Linux: Difference between revisions

The [[Unix]] operating system was conceived and implemented in 1969 at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the United States by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie]], Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna and first released in 1971. Unix was written in assembly language and later re-written in C in 1973 by Dennis Ritchie. Its wide availability and Porting due to being written in C meant that it was widely adopted, copied and modified by academic institutions and businesses, with its design being influential on authors of other systems.

The [[GNU Project]], started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, had the goal of creating a ""''complete Unix-compatible software system''"" composed entirely of [[free software]]. Work began in 1984. Later, in 1985, Stallman created the Free Software Foundation and wrote the [[GNU General Public License]] (GNU GPL) in 1989. By the early 1990s, many of the programs required in an operating system (such as libraries, compilers, text editors, a [[Unix shell]], and a windowing system) were completed, although low-level elements such as [[device driver]]s, daemon, and the kernel were stalled and incomplete. Linus Torvalds has said that if the GNU kernel had been available at the time (1991), he would not have decided to write his own.