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.