Linus Torvalds, dissatisfied with MINIX: this is how Linux was born
The story begins in 1991 in Finland, where the young university student Linus Torvalds, dissatisfied with MINIX, the operating system developed by Andrew Tanenbaum to teach UNIX on the Network Systems course at the University of Amsterdam, decided to build his own solution that would allow him to explore the full potential of the hardware at his disposal.
MINIX had decidedly poor support for the new 32-bit i386 architecture, especially as regards input-output peripherals, and it also had a particularly restrictive licensing policy that prevented it from being modified.
So Torvalds set to work on building a terminal emulator (written in C and Assembly) that could run without any operating system and was mainly aimed at two operations: sending signals to and receiving signals from the serial port through two separate processes (threads, to be precise).
To get support with development, Torvalds made the project public on the very newsgroup dedicated to MINIX, comp.os.minix, writing the famous message of 25 August 1991 that officially marks the birth of Linux.
The first version (v. 0.01) was made available on 17 September 1991.
The young Torvalds became passionate about the project and soon developed an early prototype of a file system (similar to that of MINIX, for compatibility), which made it possible to break the last dependencies on MINIX (v. 0.11) and begin transforming the “terminal” into a true Kernel based on POSIX specifications. It would nevertheless take almost another year until Rémy Card designed the Extended File Sytem (ext), the first one specifically conceived for Linux and free of the compatibility constraints with MINIX.
The project attracted growing interest and Linus decided to release it under the GPL (GNU General Public License), turning it into the “free and open” solution we all know.
Probably nobody at the time could have predicted that this feature would become the premise for its great success in the years to come, whereas today Linux has become the most important Open Source Software project in the World.
With the various releases came the official name “Linux” (LINus UniX). The choice is attributed to Ari Lemke, an assistant at the Helsinki University of Technology, who used it as the name of the directory made available for the project (on ftp.funet.fi). The name originally chosen by Torvalds, on the other hand, was Freax, a combination of “free”, “freak” and “x”, to indicate the Unix-like characteristics of the system.
The birth of Red Hat Linux
In 1994 Marc Ewing created a Linux distribution called Red Hat Linux.
This version of the operating system was released in October and for this reason became famous as the “Halloween version”.
Later, in 1995, Young bought Ewing’s business, founding Red Hat Software, in which Young held the role of chief executive officer.
Anyone can run, analyse, modify and redistribute the source code, and even sell copies of the modified code, as long as they remain under the same licence.
With Red Hat, too, companies can take advantage of the benefits of Open Source for the Enterprise (including the innovation initiatives promoted by the community) combined with Enterprise-level support, to make it easier to adopt Open Source technology securely.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the Linux Operating System preferred by large Companies, certified on hundreds of Clouds and by thousands of vendors.
The benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for customers and Companies
It provides a consistent foundation for various types of environments and the tools needed to deliver services and workloads faster for any application,
it reduces deployment complexity and costs, accelerating time to value for critical workloads and enabling development and operations teams to focus on innovation initiatives in any environment through collaboration.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a stable, consistent foundation for deployment in any Hybrid Cloud environment, as well as manageability and integration with the full range of Red Hat Automation and management solutions.
With thousands of certified Hardware, Software and Cloud solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ideal Operating System for innovation, as it provides the latest development tools, Container technologies, Hardware and Cloud advances.
Customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux gain economic benefits in the order of 1,000 billion US dollars a year from the operating system alone.
IDC revealed these figures and much more in a 2019 study: “The economic impact of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is in the order of trillions of dollars (this is not a misprint)”.
Support for emerging technologies
Red Hat has now reached its eighth version.
The most recent Linux release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, makes it possible to bring together the systems that lead towards emerging technologies.
From Containers to Automation and Artificial Intelligence, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was created for innovators, tailored for developers and designed for business operations.
It adapts to the needs of any Company and lays the foundations for the future.
