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The Unix System (Uniplexed Information and Computing System) was made by a group of AT&T computer programmers at Bell Labs at the end of 1960’, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The system was supposed to be simple in usage and written in a highly sophisticated language. At first it was a B programming language but in 1973 the Unix System was rewritten in C programming language.

 Dennis Ritchie However, the creators of the Unix System separated and two versions of the system were created – one called BSD of the Berkeley University (California) and another called ‘System V’ continued by AT&T. Both versions started to compete with each other in the 80’. Later AT&T sold the Unix licence to others producers of computer equipment. It brought about creation some commercial version such as Solaris (made by Sun Microsystem).

Ken Thompson The commercial version was not a good idea for Richard Stallman from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He started to work at GNU (GNU's Not Unix) Project – software for free. The GNU Project was an open source and everyone could copy it. Up to the 90’ the only missing element was the kernel. In 1991 Linus Torvalds a Computer Science student from Helsinki managed to create it last. It was called GNU/Linux or just Linux. The first version of Linux was able to serve only discs and small files system. However, it didn’t have an implemented floppy disc drive.

Linus Torvalds WThe free access to the source developed a lot of versions varying only in the kind of enclosed programmes and the way of preparing the system. The most popular distributions in the 90’ were Debian, Red Hat and Slackware.

In the last years the popularity of the Linux has grow up very much and it has become very common. Now it is a biggest rival for Microsoft Windows system.

Autor: Aleksandra Przybyło
aleksandraprzybylo@gmail.com