A Historical Look At The First Linux Kernel

LinuxFan writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating article about the first Linux kernel, version 0.01, complete with source code and photos of Linus Torvalds as a young man attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally planned to call the kernel "Freax," and in his first announcement noted, "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." He also stressed that the kernel was very much tied to the i386 processor, "simply, I'd say that porting is impossible." Humble beginnings."

Linus even wrote a book about it

[bomanbot]

To get an even deeper look into the beginnings of the Linux Kernel, I like the book that Linus wrote which is called Just for Fun - The story of an accidental revolutionary (ISBN 1-58799-080-6, google the rest).

It contains the entire back history how Linux began as a side project and of course the famous spat with Andrew Tanenbaum over Minix and Linux and I found it to be a good (if very nerdy) read.

But the pictures in the article? Just sad, he reminds me so much of myself ;-)

Re:"Humble beginnings"

[Corporate Troll]

Besides, for those too lazy to read up the history of Open Source and Linux, just watch Revolution OS [google.com]. Features Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and many more.

More than just a kernel

[sepluv]

just as a preemptive strike against all the Linus-entirely-made-the-OS-himself trolls before they come out of the woodwork, here is the last paragraph of section 2 from the announcement in the TFA. Torvalds says it better than I could:

Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft. These tools aren't in the distribution - ask me (or GNU) for more info.

Re:Note the mention of GNU

[DrXym]

Correction GNU Hurd.

Re:History of GCC

[LWATCDR]

Hate to tell you this but GCC wasn't the first free compiler. It wasn't even the first c compile.
There was the Small c compiler that dates back all the way to 1980. There was also the DICE compiler for the Amiga written by Matt Dillon of FireflyBSD fame that was from around the same time frame.
Now GCC is leaps and bounds ahead of those compilers today but without if RMS hadn't written GCC frankly I think Somebody would have like Matt Dillon maybe.

Re:Ready?

[RAMMS+EIN]

``...and it was almost ready for the desktop.''

At the time, it sort of was. Remember, this was the age of DOS. I don't know how much you could actually do with Linux at the time, but GNU was already a vastly more featureful system than DOS. When the first Linux distribution came out (Slackware, 1993), it sported all the glory of the GNU system, a GUI (XFree86), the ability to run DOS, and, if I recall correctly, even some support for running win16 (remember, Windows 95 wasn't out yet) programs.

Re:How would one build this?

[LWATCDR]

Well I think that is a bit unfair.
Minix and Linux where different proposes in mind from the start. I would consider them be both be highly successful.
Minix was included with a text book. Minix was written to teach students how a Unix like OS worked so they could learn how write operating system code! Minix was very portable, clearly written, and would even run on an 8088 and 68000. It's technical limitations where just a logical trade off.
Requiring people to own the book to have the OS was probably a mistake but My guess is that the author wanted to prevent people from reselling Minix. Plus he really wanted people to buy his book.
Linux was some guy that wanted to write a free Unix Kernel for his 386 and he didn't care if it worked on anything but a 386 or frankly anything but his own computer.
Frankly at that time I and everybody else was waiting for the real free UNIX that the GNU project was going to write. The future was going to be GNU Unix and it was going to be a state of the art micro kernel based UNIX like OS. Of course the future doesn't really feel obligated to follow our plans.
Minix was a brilliant success. How many of the early Linux Kernel developers read Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum?
I would say that Minix it did it's job very well.

Now Minix3 is a very new project. Frankly I find it very interesting. It is micro kernel and it runs drivers in user space. The goal is to create self healing OS. AKA a driver crashing will not take out the OS.
It uses BSD instead of the GPL which I am beginning to favor because of what I consider the bad spirited anti-Tivo clauses in GPLV3.
I really hope that Minix3 does get the attention that it deserves. Just as I hope the OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, and Linux continue to grow and thrive.

Re:History of GCC

[fsmunoz]

Hate to tell you this but GCC wasn't the first free compiler. It wasn't even the first c compile.

Maybe not, but your examples don't seem to totally support that :)

There was the Small c compiler that dates back all the way to 1980.

That's correct, but the scope of Small C and GCC are, I think, a bit different... Small C was made for embeded systems and supports a subset of the C language. It was there, true, but GCC was the first ANSI C free compiler.

There was also the DICE compiler for the Amiga written by Matt Dillon of FireflyBSD fame that was from around the same time frame.

DICE was shareware (... I sold DICE as shareware and it quite unexpectedly generated a fair chunk of income. This allowed me to expand into later Amiga models (A3000) as well as put together some fairly souped up PC's (for the times), on which I ran Linux... [kerneltrap.org]). The source code has been made available (http://www.obviously.com/dice/) but that was in 1997, so quite recently comparing with GCC. I'm not even going into the DICE licence.

if RMS hadn't written GCC frankly I think Somebody would have like Matt Dillon maybe.

Sure. That can be said of anything ever done by anyone I think...

Re:How would one build this?

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Plus he really wanted people to buy his book.''

He, or the publisher. IIRC, it took quite some convincing on Andy's part to actually allow Minix to be distributed by third parties at all.

More like Phoenix and AMD

[IvyKing]

If it weren't for the PeeCee clone market made possible by the Phoenix BIOS and the competition in the processor market keeping Intel on their toes, the low cost high performance Linux system as we know it wouldn't exist.

Remember, back around 1990, IBM and Compaq system prices were pretty close to what was being asked for low end HP/Apollo, Sun and MIPS boxes. Now if DEC had been more agressive with the pricing for Alpha and Ultrix...

Re:History of GCC

[vga_init]

Strictly speaking, he didn't just "sit down" and write his own compiler from scratch. He spent a lot of time searching for a free compiler that was already complete, and finally he found one. It wasn't a C compiler, so he made the necessary modifications to get it going. Also, he didn't do it by himself--Leonard Tower was working on it full time, and there were other assistants.