The Origins of Linux
Anyone worth their weight in salt knows how Linux came to be. What is interesting though is how Linus chose what features to include, and how things got started on a larger scale. I came across this posting on exactly that topic:
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
The responses to this initial posting are really cool, and provide direct lineage to many of the features Linux is known for. Pseudo TTYs, BSD sockets, user-mode filesystems, and POSIX compatibility were all suggested by Jyrki Kuoppala (who is a supporter of the EFF!). Other ideas which are completely standard now include paging to disk and processes that aren’t assigned a fixed amount of memory on process creation, which were both suggested by early kernel hacker Peter Holzer.
There is a lot more in those responses, and they aren’t long. Take a quick look at them, and enjoy gems like Linus stating “it is NOT portable.” If only he knew where his little project would be even five years later…
