A History of GNU/Linux

By Elijah Voigt

In the beginning...

Unix!

Linux!

GNU!

All of the Distros!

Notes

Wikipedia is a totally valid source... because I'm using it.

If I say something that's wrong, share your insights.

If I miss something big, share your insights.

Don't be afraid to ask questions.

In the Beginning there were punchcards...

In the Beginning there were punchcards...

Timesharing sucked a lot less

This guy knows what's up

In the Beginning there were punchcards...

Notable Timesharing OSs

• Bell Labs, GE, and MIT's Multics
• The Oregon State University OS-3
• Stanford ORVYL and WYLBUR
• AT&T Bell Labs Unix

These were all very hardware dependent

Note : Micro/Monolithic Kernels

In the Beginning there were punchcards...

Unix/Unix-like

POSIX

Distros:

• Berkly Software Distribution (BSD)
• Free BSD
• OSX/Darwin
• Linux
• Minix

Minix

Created for educational purposes

Cheap, but not FOSS

Create by Andrew S. Tanenbaum to show the principles in Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (1987)

POSIX Compliant through version 2

Designed for limited resource systems

Linux

Created by Linus Torvalds 1991

• Embedded systems
• 95% of the world's super computers
• Phones
• Servers
• Desktops

If it's got a power chord, it can run Linux.

GNU Utils

"GNU's NOT UNIX"

Exclusively FOSS

Started by Richard Stallman 1983

GNU Utils

Distros

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Mint
• Centos
• Fedora
• Arch
• Slackware
• Open SuSE