A great many things have been said about Linux, some of them are clever and some of them are oh so funny. Like many great things in IT, Linux is obscured from the general population and yet it is an intregal part in the daily life of more than half of the people on this globe. But what is Linux, where did it come from and how did it become so prominent in the IT world? Lets have a look and start by going decades back to world very different from our modern times.
The following is my take on the rise of Linux as both an observer and a participant in the revolution which the operating system started. I willfully omit company names or naming individuals as I am more interested the spirit driving this incredible phenomenon.
In the eighties the IT world was basically divied into three parts. The mainframes, the minicomputer and the micros, more commonly known as PCs. Mainframes created the backbone of the IT world and were the norm when it came to heavy duty lifting in like banking, defense and government. This is very evident from the image the general population had about computers back then. Long rows of big cabinets and whirring reels of tape locked away in white rooms doing some magical stuff no one really understood. Techo priests in white coats would wander between the cabinets, take notes, push buttons and watch blinking lights. In other words, a place of techno worship firmly out of peoples hands where only the chosen ones would have admission for entrance. Part of the myth is explained in its past. Mainframes, due to their nature are huge beasts and since they are more or less the original modern computers a certain mindset grew into existance that mainframes were the only possible way of creating and running a computer. In the early days this was rather self explanatory, mainframes were what is commonly called batch driven, i.e. they could only do one task at a time and the whole of the computer was dedicated to the one task. The components of the times were large, unwieldy and highly unstable so creating a logical circuit simply occupied large space which meant mainframes were massive installations and only for large entities to own and run. But as time progressed large leaps were made in hardware and although mainframes retained their size the hardware inside the cabinets shrunk in size which meant it was possible to build further out in such way that a three hundred square meter mainframe had a thousand time increase in capacity compared to same size earlier generations ones. However, the sentiment, capacity non withstanding, was computers could only be built in certain ways and they belonged to companies, institutiones and goverments. The idea that a person could own a computer simply didnt occur. One could say a mainframe mania was ruling the fledgling IT world and it was run with an iron fist from the main mainframe manufacturers side. And yet, as it is with oppression there will be rise in the sentiment of rebellion against the establishment and rebelled they did. Companies started popping up with a new concept, the minicomputer. Say goodbye to hundreds of square meters of hardware, tens of kilowatts of electricity and yearly costs in millions. Say hi to a computer one could easily fit into a few square meters and the upshot is it is managable by one or two persons. So, along came the minis and they brought with them sort of a revolution. Instead of, in the case of the mainframe, being locked to the vendor about everything, hardware, software, maintenance, etc, you could buy a mini computer and you could technically add to it hardware and software from third parties and even develop your own software to run the computer and all this at the fraction of the price of a small mainframe. Suddenly computing power was available not only to the big wigs on the block but also to universities, smaller companies, research centers and whole slew of interesting parties which needed machines to work for them. So in the middle of the golden age of mainframes a rebellious force rose and started putting its mark on the world. It basically became two worlds. On one side, the mainframe world, hugely regulated and in total control by the mainframe makers with the almost religious mindset of running the machines, very static, very boxed off, extremely closed. On the other side, the mini computer world, a much less regulated world, for one the mini computer makers werent as obsessive about their control over the eco system and a price tag which was within the reach of sane persons which meant mini computer installations popped up in a multitude of universities and smaller research institutions and companies which all started to produce their own code and hardware for the machines. It became sort of a grass root moment and even if alot of it was about bone hard business it was progressive, people tried out new things because the mini computers allowed for relentless experimentation without people getting mutilated by corporate greed. Needless to say, both worlds werent totally isolated from each other. Borrowing of ideas and philosophies happened all the time and at the edges of both worlds progressive things happened which would influence the other. One of these progressive influential things was the notion that as mainframe power increased the idea of the computer user was born. As mainframes were batch driven, i.e. one task at a time which in essense means there is only one user using the whole mainframe at a time, the idea of a possibility of multi user system doing multiple tasks at once started to circulate. It was a real break away from the original core concept of mainframes as it visualised the computer as a machine capable of serving many users at once which in essense meant it would do multiple tasks at once. The idea gained traction and it would at that time be called a time sharing operating system. The name speaks for itself, multiple users share time on the computer. Again, in those times it was a radical idea and a paradigm shift in the basic philosophy of what a computer was. The idea turned out to be a popular one and it gained a permament track in the advancements of mainframes and would eventually become the norm and known as multitasking which of course is a concept we modern people take for granted and are used to have around on our computers, tablets and phones. In fact, multitasking is so important in IT it is one of the core concepts running our modern day world. However, in ancient times, things were very different to say the least so going back to the mainframes and the time sharing we can confidently say it was a radical shift and the mini computer world did take notice and became extremely open to the idea as the new kids on the block werent bogged down by the old fart mindset of how to run things. And so it was some clever people sat down and wrote a multi user, multitasking operating system for a particular mini computer brand and they named it Multics. Multics was an extremely advanced operating system for its time and arguably one of the first which incorporated concepts, ideas and philosophies we all now take for granted. You noticed I said it was written on a mini computer, right? This is actually important in computer history due to the fact that the existance of the mini computer made it possible for the idea for Multics to come up so its easy to say, without the minicomputer things would look extremely different today. Multics gained traction and became popular. It facilitated the need for user access to computer resources and pawed the way for a lot more people coming in touch with a computer for the first time in their lives. But as good as it was Multics was not failure free and one of the things which griped a lot of users was it was fairly complex to use and had quirks which people didnt entirly got around so in the light of that something was bound to happen and one day two young men sat down and came up with an idea for an operating system which would be based on Multics but the main goal was to simplify things as much as possible while retaining some of the core concepts of Multics such as multitasking They got hold of a mini computer and set about writing their ideas into code and eventually got it working. To name their brainchild they wanted the name to reflect both its roots in Multics and as well empathise it was a single person operating system so without much fanfare Unix was born into the world. It became an instant hit mainly because of its simple ways of working and humanly logic layout and soon it would spread it wings and take off into the computer world. One of Unix main strength was it could run on a small mini computer, it wasnt resource needy and it was easy to write for it. It was kernel based, i.e. one common layer between the hardware and the user so there was no need for complex coprocessors and subsystems to be handled separatly. In the initial version there were thirty two commands but as people got the hang of it many many more commands would be written to expand on the operating system. Unix gained ground and soon it became one of the favorite toys of IT tinkeres and with growing popularity manufacturers began to take notice and incorporate the new operating system into their portfolios by porting it to their system architectures and offer it along with their own operating system solutions. This is an important point. Due to the way Unix was written it was relativly easily portable to a slew of different architectures which in turn would increase its availability and popularity and make it grow from being basically a curiosity to a fully blown operating system for serious tasks. However, as good as it sounds and as popular Unix became, especially among universitites things werent exactly paradise like. First of all, a major company acquired the rights to Unix and as it set about standardizing the operating system they also introduced license cost for usage and porting and this particular company, not known for being a charity, would be dead set on squeezing as many dollars out of Unix as they possibly could. And they were very succesful. Unix gained a wide traction and many hardware and software manufacturers paid their dues and ported Unix to their particular flavor and made it available to the world. Unix would soon become the go to solution to many computing problems and despite it changing through different versions and an ideological split it opened up a new market and made access to a computer easy. Such was the popularity that hardware vendors created specific hardware for Unix at a pricing level which made it very affordable, either in server or in a workstation configuration. Now, mind you, when I say very afforadble we are still talking about a price tag beyond the reach of the average person. But as often happens in the IT world things are progressive and there has never been any shortage of visionaries and tinkerers so while Unix was gaining traction and becoming a main stay there were rumours about a new breed of computers being born, the micro. Now, what is a micro computer. We have already established mainframes and minis, what about the micro? The micro is essentially born out of a movement of tinkerers who wanted their own computer with their own oprating system and programs to run. The micro, or Personal Computer as we know it today is the product of the need to bring the computer to the people and it has a very colorful beginning which we wont detail here but lets just say it was a wild wild west which would lead to a revolution in how we use computers, namely, one computer, one user and its relativly soon in that revolution where we touch down next in our story on Linux. You see, things were heating up in the Unix world. The company which owned the rights to Unix had at that time decided to to Gordon Gecko on the market and proposed to up the license fee quite dramatically. There is no evidence there was any development need for this, it was simply corporate greed. This of course meant that the cost of running a beefy Unix server for multiuser purposes would become very expensive and the universities were among those hit the hardest as they could not afford the horrible license fees and one particular university in Finland was particularly hit hard so it faced the reality that its student servers were sub par on capacity which in turn enraged the students because they either couldnt get access to overfilled servers or the servers were really slow. In other words, the university needed to scale back on its resources, much to the angerment of the students and one student in particular took this badly but unlike his fellow students this young man had a particular idea. If he had limited access to the universites Unix servers then what if he had his own. Somehow that idea stuck and germinated in the young mans head so one day he sat down and started writing his own code to what would look like, feel and behave like a Unix system. No easy feat by any means but the young man persisted and did in fact succeed with a bootable system which for all intents was a small Unix operating system except it didnt contain any code from Unix and he had done all of this on a common none too spectacular PC. The young man didnt have too much confidence in the beginning but decided to package his work and send it out to a popular computer mailing list where he described the system and hoped there could be some interest in it oh and by the way, he called it Linux. Yes, many of us still look to that fateful day when Linus Thorvalds sent out his first working version of Linux with awe and wonder cause none of us Linux nerds would be where we are today if he hadnt pressed that particular Send button. History it seems isnt above miracles, even if they are on a small scale in the beginning. We need to understand one thing here. What Linus Thorvalds initally create was more of a concept, namely that it was possible to replicate basic functions of the Unix core functions without running any Unix related code. Despite the initial release being extremely primitive and not able to boot itself people caught on, mostly programmers who would reckognise the possibilites in Thorvalds work so soon afterwards and now energised from the reception of the initial release, Thorvalds released the first bootable version of Linux and from there on things started to happen quickly. As earlier mentioned, programmers understood quite quickly the capacity of the invention and they started doing their magic so many features were added to the fledgling operating system and lots of development happened. And then the revolution began. Not long after the operating system took its first steps everybody wanted in, even the silver haired cyber grandma, not just the tinkerers and nerds but serious people and companies with serious resources behind them threw their lot in and since Linux was from the get go opensource people shared their resources and contributions. Linux went from being a toy to a promising real world operating system and environment at phenomenal speed. And then it happened. People started taking this youngling seriously and started to speculate and implement Linux as an operating system for real world environments. In other words, Linux started making a name for itself and since it had the open source community at its back, development and innovations came at lightning speed. There were of course growing pains and not all implementations were equal but sooner than later Linux became a serious contender in the mature IT world. It is important to understand thing in context here. The growing open source community threw it conciderable power behind Linux but lets not forget the users. Developers are users but not all users are developers and there in lies the nut. Linux found an enormous demography. The first generation of what we might call modern computer nerds. These were young people with IT on their minds and they were looking for something which could fullfill their needs. They were fenced off by an older stagnat IT world which prohibited their natural tendency to tinker with everything so as Linux rose to prominence it found audience with these young people who saw in the operating system all their dreams come true. An operating system behaving like a mature powerful OS like Unix but free. It was an instant hit and Linux in one form or the other became the go to operating system to a new generation of nerds and tinkerers and these people would eventually become a part of the backbone of the fledgling modern IT industry and take their experience and preferences with them which in turn opened the gates for Linux to expand into the big world. Whole companies were formed around Linux to create distributions which all touted themselves as the best ones but in reality the most successful distributions were formed as collectives or non monetary organisations. Development paced at lighting speed and new versions were frequently introduced as well as the distros, their number increased and with time people started following some distros more than others and the distro wars began which were in earnest more of a joke than any serious thing although IT people would tend to stick with their distro of liking and influence policies on infrastructure in the companies they worked at. Ahh, yes, soon the golden age of Linux started and what started with a humble mail became the gold standard in everything IT infrastructure. This is evident in the early web server wars where proprietary companies pitted their products against a growing Linux community in the web server sector and that war was ultimatly won by a handful of web server applications for Linux and two of them are now the standard for everything web. At a point in time it seemed Linux was everywhere, from the basement of the tinkerer, in the infrastructure and at the very high end of the computing power, the super computers which would readily adapt the operating system and develop to the extent that all top five hundred super computers in the world run Linux. But the influx of Linux would eventually come from a obscure corner of technology which had a bumpy start and a lot of teething problems, the cell phone. Cell phones had of course existed but they were for the longest time heavy, burdensome, extremely expensive and with limited power and the last one is not due to the technology lagging behind but rather that the industry struggled to define the cell phone beyond a device to talk into. At a point in time two things happened. A fruit company eventually released what would become the standard definition for a cell phone and the second is an alphabetical company decided to get involved in the cell phone business and wrote an operating system which is basically a Linux kernel with a Java machine on top and decided to release this OS to any hardware production company willing to create a phone for it. Both the fruit company and the alphabetical company were hits but the latter one emerged as a victor due to the fact how easy it was to adopt their operating system, build hardware and more crucially, develop apps. And so it is Linux in one of its many forms which powers billions of cell phones around the world and is quietly ticking at the hearts of all those handsets. It is of course heavily modified to suit its task but still is Linux. So as the years have passed Linux has expanded its presence and given new developers, new hardware people and pretty much anyone who wants to build something IT, a chance to realize their dreams and build something new and wonderful. Linux of course continues to develop and mature. The movement behind the Linux kernel counts thousands of individuals and behind the eco system as a whole there are tens of thousands of people who every day contribute to the development of an idea which started as as a humble dream and became one of the all time dominant forces in IT. Thorvalds is of course still at the helm, guiding the process with his eagle eye for details and quality. He is now middle aged and a long way away from the nerdy student posting about his idea because Linus is now the captain of the biggest fleet of devices in the human universe and with his grit and integrity steers its towards the future.