Manual

1. A bit of history

Linux is an operating system based on UNIX. It is said to be a UNIX-like operating system, as it behaves in a way similar to a UNIX system. In order to study and understand Linux, we must therefore first take a look at UNIX.

UNIX originated from an internal need at AT&T, an American telecommunications company. The goal was to organize data found on various types of supports and on heterogeneous systems using a single system, independent of the equipment. The AT&T team first developed the UNIX tree structure that we know today, and before long, modelled the entire behaviour of a computing machine.

Studying Linux therefore involves the study of a machine model, that is, the UNIX model.

• 1960 - Developed by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie at Brian Kernighan at the AT&T Bell Laboratories.
• 1970 - Commercialization of UNIX.
• 1974 - AT&T gives UNIX source code to the University of California, Berkeley.

The Internet revolution and the development of UNIX in parallel:

• 1962 - Development of the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency).
• 1962 - Development of the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Project Agency NETwork).
• 1969 - UNIX – TCP/IP.
• 1974-80 – Creation of the GNU project and of the Free Software Foundation.
• 1980 OpenGroup, X/Open, POSIX, X/Free, GNU, FSF.
• 1991 Start of the Linux Project.