A brief history of Linux.

Linux is a free reimplementation of the POSIX specification, with SYSV and BSD extensions, developed primarily by Linus
Torvalds (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi) at the university of Helsinki in Finland.Linux was developed with the help of other
programmers across the Internet, allowing anyone with enough knowledge to develop and change the system.
A large amount of code written for linux is developed by the GNU project at The Free Software Foundation in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Linux was originally developed as a hobby project by Linus Torvalds, because he wanted a better operating system than
Minix, a small UNIX system developed by Andy Tanenbaum.The first discussions about Linux were on USENET newsgroup
comp.os.minix.

The very early development of Linux was dealing with the task-switching capabilities of the 80386 protected mode.
Linus writes :

" After that it was plain sailing: hairy coding still,but i had some devices,

and debugging was easier.I started using C at this stage,and it certainly
speeds up development.This is also when I start to get serious about my
megalomaniac ideas to make 'a better Minix than Minix'.I was hoping I'd
be able to recompile gcc under Linux some day ....
Two months for basic setup,but then only slightly longer until I had a
disk-drive (seriously buggy, but it happened to work on my machine) and
a small filesystem.That was about when I made 0.01 available [around late
August of 1991]: it wasn't pretty,it had no floppy driver, and it couldn't do
much anything.
I don't think anybody ever compiled that version.But then I was hooked,
and I didn't want to stop until I could chuck out Minix."

No announcement was ever made for Linux version 0.01.On 5 October of 1991, Linus announced the 0.02 version of Linux.
At this point Linus,was able to run bash and gcc.
Linus wrote in comp.os.minix :

"Do you pine for the nice days of Minix-1.1, when men were men and
wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just
dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs?
Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on Minix? No more
all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be
just for you.
As I mentioned a month ago, I'm working on a free version of a
Minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage
where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want),
and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is just
version 0.02...but I've successfully run bash, gcc, gnu-make, gnu-sed,
compress, etc. under it."'

After version 0.03,more and more programmers started to work on the system, so Linus set the version number up to 0.10.
After several versions,in late December of 1993, the Linux kernel was at version 0.99.pl14 and version 1.0 was around the
corner.Finally version 1.0 was released on 14 March of 1994.
Linux follows the ``open development model'' that means, all new versions will be released to the public, whether or not they are considered "production quality"'. However, in order to help people tell whether they are getting a stable version or not, the following scheme has been implemented: Versions 1.x.y, where x is an even number, are stable versions, and only bug fixes will be applied as y is incremented. So from version 1.2.2 to 1.2.3, there were only bug fixes, and no new features. Versions 1.x.y, where x is an odd number, are beta-quality releases for developers only, and may be unstable and may crash, and are having new features added to them all the time

As of January 13, 1997, the current stable version of Linux is 2.0.27, and the latest development version is 2.1.20.

Author : Nick Arahovas
For comments or suggestions mail at infonick@hol.gr
Last updated : 25-Feb-1997