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The history of Linux began in 1991 with the commencement of a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. Since then, the resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.2.3 version in 2015 with more than 18 million lines of source code under the GNU General Public License. ==Events leading to creation== After AT&T had dropped out of the Multics project, the Unix operating system was conceived and implemented by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (both of AT&T Bell Laboratories) in 1969 and first released in 1970. Later they rewrote it in a new programming language, C, to make it portable. The availability and portability of Unix caused it to be widely adopted, copied and modified by academic institutions and businesses. In 1983, Richard Stallman started the GNU project with the goal of creating a free UNIX-like operating system.〔(Initial Announcement ) of the GNU Project, 1983〕 As part of this work, he wrote the GNU General Public License (GPL). By the early 1990s, there was almost enough available software to create a full operating system. However, the GNU kernel, called Hurd, failed to attract enough development effort, leaving GNU incomplete. Another free operating system project, initially released in 1977, was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). This was developed by UC Berkeley from the 6th edition of Unix from AT&T. Since BSD contained Unix code that AT&T owned, AT&T filed a lawsuit (''USL v. BSDi'') in the early 1990s against the University of California. This strongly limited the development and adoption of BSD.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable )〕 In 1985, Intel released the 80386, the first x86 microprocessor with a 32-bit instruction set and a memory management unit with paging.〔(Intel 80386 )〕 In 1986, Maurice J. Bach, of AT&T Bell Labs, published ''The Design of the UNIX Operating System''. This definitive description principally covered the System V Release 2 kernel, with some new features from Release 3 and BSD. MINIX, a Unix-like system intended for academic use, was released by Andrew S. Tanenbaum to exemplify the principles conveyed in his textbook, ''Operating Systems: Design and Implementation'' in 1987. While source code for the system was available, modification and redistribution were restricted. In addition, MINIX's 16-bit design was not well adapted to the 32-bit features of the increasingly cheap and popular Intel 386 architecture for personal computers. In the early nineties a commercial UNIX operating system for Intel 386 PCs was too expensive for private users.〔:Video 0:50〕 These factors and the lack of a widely adopted, free kernel provided the impetus for Torvalds' starting his project. He has stated that if either the GNU Hurd or 386BSD kernels had been available at the time, he likely would not have written his own. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Linux」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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