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Open source history is tied to three operating systems: Unix, GNU, and Linux. These were projects that initially shaped the identity of the open source community, beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present day, and proved that open source is a viable software development model. No study of open source is complete without understanding the history of these systems. Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIXâ„¢) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
GNU (pronounced ) is a computer operating system - consisting of a kernel, libraries, system utilities, compilers, and end-user application software - composed entirely of free software. ...
Linux refers to any Unix-like computer operating system which uses the Linux kernel. ...
Unix
Multics In the late 1960s, Bell Labs, owned by AT&T, began working collaboratively with General Electric and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create a new operating system. The system, known as Multics, was to be used in-house at Bell Labs. Although Multics was a significant achievement in the realm of computer science, it was also time-consuming and expensive. Its goals were too lofty for Bell Labs to achieve, and in 1968 Bell began to withdraw from the project (Hauben 1994). Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) was the main research and development arm of the United States Bell System. ...
GE redirects here. ...
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private coeducational research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT has five schools and one college, containing 32 academic departments,[2] with a strong emphasis on theoretical, applied, and interdisciplinary scientific and technological research. ...
Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extraordinarily influential early time-sharing operating system. ...
Some of the last people to work on Multics, at Bell Labs, were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Joe Ossanna. For these three and others, the loss of Multics was a disaster. At the time, other operating systems lacked the flexibility and simplicity that Multics had promised. Thompson and the rest decided to build a new operating system to suit their programming needs. After Bell Labs rejected their requests for a new computer, the group found an obsolete PDP-7 computer on which to begin their efforts. They called the new operating system Unix to distinguish it from Multics and began work. Ken Thompson Kenneth Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is a computer scientist notable for his contributions to the development of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system. ...
Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. ...
Joseph F. Ossanna (December 10, 1928 - November 28, 1977), received his BSEE from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, in 1952. ...
Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIXâ„¢) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
Unix Work progressed smoothly on Unix throughout the early 1970s. The group acquired new computers, developed the high-level programming language C, making Unix portable, and created many new tools to make Unix more useful. Within Bell Labs, other departments began to use Unix for a variety of tasks. Unix eventually became the standard for Bell’s computing needs, and a development support group, called Unix Support Group, was formed to provide support for a standard version of Unix. Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIXâ„¢) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1970 calendar). ...
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of C Programming The C programming language (often, just C) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ...
Even in its infancy, word of Unix was spreading throughout the computing world. Unix was particularly appealing to the academic computer science community. Academic institutions were able to purchase licenses for the Unix source code very cheaply. Government and commercial licenses were much more expensive.
In November of 1973, Professor Bob Fabry of the University of California at Berkeley attended a presentation on Unix at Purdue University. His interest was piqued, and Fabry convinced Berkeley to purchase a PDP-11/45 computer capable of running the current version 4 of Unix. In January of the next year, Version 4 Unix was installed with the help of Ken Thompson of Bell Labs. Look up November in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
1973 (MCMLXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday. ...
The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ...
Purdue University (Purdue) is a land-grant, public university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States. ...
January is the first month of the year and one of seven Gregorian months with the length of 31 days. ...
1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ...
In the fall of 1975, Ken Thompson decided to take a one-year sabbatical from Bell Labs to teach at Berkeley, his alma mater. The Computer Science department had just purchased the new PDP-11/70 computer, and Thompson helped to install the latest version of Unix, Version 6, on it. Two graduate students, Bill Joy and Chuck Haley, also arrived in 1975, and began working on a Pascal compiler written by Thompson, a new text editor, and improvements to underlying parts of the Unix system itself. 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday. ...
Alma mater is Latin for nourishing mother. It was used in ancient Rome as a title for the mother goddess, and in Medieval Christianity for the Virgin Mary. ...
Bill Joy (left) with Paul Saffo. ...
1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday. ...
Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ...
Notepad is the standard text editor for Microsoft Windows A text editor is a piece of computer software for editing plain text. ...
Other programmers began to take interest in the new Pascal compiler at Berkeley, and during the year of 1977, Joy began to distribute the "Berkeley Software Distribution," an open source version of Unix containing the improvements and additions made at Berkeley. BSD was sold for a nominal fee to people who had already obtained a Unix license from AT&T. In mid-1978, Joy put together the "Second Berkeley Software Distribution," or 2BSD, which was distributed the following year. Distribution jumped from about thirty copies with the original BSD to about seventy-five copies with 2BSD. 3 programmers. ...
For the album by Ash, see 1977 (album). ...
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
This article describes the present AT&T Inc. ...
1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday. ...
Improvements continued, increasing portability, improving memory usage, and implementing new tools. In December 1979, 3BSD was released, and nearly 100 copies were shipped. At this time, with the breakup of Bell, the price of Unix licenses for the academic community began to increase. AT&T shifted management of Unix to a new group and began emphasizing proprietary versions of Unix (Dibona et al.: McKusick 1999). The first of these new releases was System III in 1982, followed in 1983 by System V. Berkeley moved to fill the void Bell had left in open distributions and continued to release further versions of BSD, using a new open source software license known as the BSD License. Look up December in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
For the Smashing Pumpkins song, see 1979 (song). ...
System III (sometimes called System 3) was a version of the Unix operating system released by AT&Ts Unix Support Group (USG). ...
1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
AT&T UNIX System V was one of the versions of the UNIX operating system. ...
AT&T did not begin heavy commercial promotion of Unix until the mid-1980s. What they found when they ventured into the market was that many vendors were already selling their own proprietary version of Unix. The issue of the day was which version of Unix would become dominant. In 1987, in an effort to unify the market, AT&T formed an alliance with Sun Microsystems, a strong supporter of BSD. In response to the move, several vendors created the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to support their own open source versions of Unix. AT&T and Sun in turn formed Unix International. Thus the "Unix Wars" began (The Open Group 2001). The 1980s refers to the years of 1980 to 1989. ...
1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...
The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was an organization founded in 1988 to create an open standard for an implementation of the Unix operating system. ...
Unix International or UI was an association created in 1988 to promote open standards, especially the Unix operating system. ...
The Unix wars were the struggles between vendors of the Unix computer operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the standard for Unix henceforth. ...
The Unix Wars Throughout the remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Unix Wars raged. During this time, many different versions of Unix were released, both proprietary and open source. In 1991, AT&T spun off Unix System Laboratories, which passed through several hands before being bought in 1995 by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). UNIX Systems Laboratories or USL was originally organized as part of Bell Labs in 1989. ...
Tarantella, Inc. ...
Three distinct versions of BSD emerged from the Unix Wars: FreeBSD, known for its simplicity, stability, and ease of use; NetBSD, known for its portability and research-oriented environment; and OpenBSD, known for its high level of security and stability (Howard). Other versions of open source Unix are available as well, including a version from SCO itself and Darwin, the foundation on which Apple’s Mac OS X is built. FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4. ...
NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-like BSD computer operating system. ...
OpenBSD is a freely available Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. ...
The GNU Project
MIT In 1971, Richard Stallman, a Harvard undergraduate student, began working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, primarily on the ITS, an operating system unique to the computers at MIT. The community at the MIT AI Lab was a small group of programmers who improved code by passing it back and forth; in other words, the group’s software development basis was open source (Rasch 2000). Richard Matthew Stallman (nickname RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is an acclaimed software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. ...
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ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, was an early, revolutionary, and influential MIT time-sharing operating system; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC. ITS development was initiated in the late 1960s by those (the majority of the MIT AI Lab...
In the early 1980s, the community at MIT AI Lab began to collapse, due in part to computer architecture advances that rendered ITS obsolete. Computers that were replacing MIT’s PDP-10s had their own operating systems, but none were open source. Even getting an executable copy meant signing a nondisclosure agreement.
At the same time that ITS became obsolete, the AI Lab community also disbanded. One of the first people to move away was Brian Reed of Carnegie Mellon University. Instead of sharing his text-formatting program Scribe, with the AI Lab community, he sold it to a commercial company, which altered the code to insure profits rather than communal improvements. Soon, spin-off companies began breaking away from the community. Eventually, nearly all of the programmers were hired away to work on commercial software projects. Richard Stallman was left with a choice: Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ...
"One: join the proprietary software world, sign the non disclosure agreements and promise not to help his fellow hackers. Two: leave the computer field altogether. Or three, look for a way that a programmer could do something for the good. He asked himself, was there a program or programs he could write, so as to make a community possible again?" (Rasch 2000).
The GNU Project Stallman’s ideals of software were lofty: he wanted free software for the masses. According to Stallman, the definition of a truly free software is a program that allows users the right to run the program for any purpose, modify the program to suit their needs, redistribute copies with open source, and distribute modified versions of the program with open source (Stallman 2002).
Stallman decided to start creating open software by developing an operating system, the most crucial software for using a computer. He anticipated a "community of cooperating hackers" that would develop around the project much as in the MIT AI Lab (Stallman 2002). He chose to make the operating system Unix compatible because that was the dominant system at the time. Stallman picked the acronym GNU for his project, according to a hacker custom of creating recursive acronyms. GNU stands for "GNU’s Not Unix" (Stallman 2002). An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. ...
The term Hackers can refer to several things: Hacker - a type of person interested in exploration, usually of a computer or electrical engineering background. ...
GNU (pronounced ) is a computer operating system - consisting of a kernel, libraries, system utilities, compilers, and end-user application software - composed entirely of free software. ...
A recursive acronym is an acronym (or occasionally, a backronym) which refers to itself in the expression for which it stands, similar to a recursive abbreviation. ...
Stallman resigned from MIT in January 1984 so that MIT would have no claim on distributing GNU. He would avoid GNU becoming proprietary software at all costs. However, he was invited by the head of the MIT AI Lab to continue using the MIT facilities.
In 1985, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a tax-exempt charitable organization, to support the free software development being done on the GNU Project. Stallman also contributed to the project by writing a multiple language compiler known as GCC, a debugger (GDB), a text editor (GNU Emacs), and other software. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded in October 1985 by Richard Stallman to support the free software movement (free as in freedom), and in particular the GNU project. ...
The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of programming language compilers produced by the GNU Project. ...
The GNU Debugger, usually called just GDB, is the standard debugger for the GNU software system. ...
GNU Emacs is one of the two most popular versions of Emacs (see also XEmacs). ...
In order to ensure that GNU would remain open source in future, Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL specified "that users of the source code could view, change, or add to the code, provided they made their changes available under the same license as the original code" (GNU General Public License). Stallman received the MacArthur fellowship, which entails a stipend of $500,000, in 1990 for his work with GNU, the GPL, and the FSF. GPL redirects here. ...
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking institution. ...
The GNU operating system continued to grow throughout the 1990s, developing piece by piece. Each piece was implemented on a Unix system, so that components could be completed and distributed before the entire system was released. By 1990, the only major piece missing from the system was the kernel. A kernel is the core of an operating system "that provides basic services for all other parts of the operating system" ("Kernel"). A kernel connects the application software to the hardware of a computer. ...
Stallman’s team began work on a kernel in 1990, called Hurd. However, work progressed slowly. The GNU Hurd is a Unix-like kernel that sets the base for the GNU operating system. ...
Linux
Minix In 1987, a professor, Andrew Tanenbaum, invented Minix, a clone of the Unix operating system to be used for educational purposes. Minix was not the most sophisticated of operating systems, but its appeal to programmers worldwide was that all 12,000 lines of C and assembly were available to be studied and tinkered with (Hasan 1999). Andrew S. Tanenbaum Andrew Stuart Andy Tanenbaum (born 1944) is the head of Department of Computer Systems, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands. ...
MINIX is an open source, Unix-like operating system (OS) based on a microkernel architecture. ...
Linux In August of 1991, Linus Torvalds, a 21 year old Computer Science student at the University of Helsinki, posted to the Minix users newsgroup that he was working on a new, free operating system, adding parenthetically that it was "just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU" (Newitz). What Torvalds was actually creating was a kernel, the core of an operating system. Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. ...
The University of Helsinki is a university located in Helsinki, Finland. ...
In 1992, the completed Linux kernel was combined with the incomplete GNU operating system, resulting in a working open source operating system. According to Stallman, "It is due to Linux that we can actually run a version of the GNU system today" (Stallman 2002). In later years, this combination of GNU and Linux along with other free software exploded in popularity and became commonly known simply as Linux. Linux refers to any Unix-like computer operating system which uses the Linux kernel. ...
In September, version 0.01 of the Linux kernel was released on the net, and enthusiasm began to rise around the project (Hasan 1999). On October 5th, Torvalds sent a formal call for volunteers to the Minix newsgroup, saying "Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs?" (Newitz 2000). Torvalds’ plea appealed to many programmers’ senses of curiosity and excitement. By December, version 0.10 was released, still as a bare-bones kernel.
Linux was then licensed under the GNU General Public License to ensure that the source would be free to all. In the ensuing years, thousands of people began working with Linux, helping to improve the kernel itself or writing software for use on Linux systems.
Throughout the 1990s, as Linux swelled in popularity and became more and more sophisticated, vendors began distributing it commercially. Although Linux was and is free and open source, vendors such as Red Hat, Novell and Mandriva have gathered it into a format that more closely resembles other contemporary operating systems. With the addition of graphical user interfaces and other user-friendly features, these distributors were able to profit from selling open source bundled into a product that everyday users wanted and could use with ease (Newitz 2000). Red Hat, Inc. ...
Novell was also the name of a road bicycle racing team. ...
Mandriva (merger of Mandrakesoft, Lycoris, and Conectiva) is a French software company, and creator of Mandriva Linux. ...
See also Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
Open source software refers to computer software available with its source code and under an open source license. ...
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
This timeline shows the development of the Linux kernel. ...
BSD redirects here; for other uses see BSD (disambiguation). ...
References - Dibona, C. (Ed.); Stone, M.; Ockman, S. (Eds.) (1999). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly & Associates..
- Hasan, Ragib (1999). History of Linux.
- Hauben, Ronda (1994). History of Unix.
- "Kernel". SearchSolaris.
- Newitz, Annalee (2000). A Brief History of Linux.
- The Open Group (2001). History and Timeline.
- Rasch, Christopher (2000). A Brief History of the Free / Open Source Software Movement.
- Stallman, Richard (2002-08-26). The GNU Project.
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