Linux is such a part of the modern landscape that it's hard to remember a time when it was just starting out.Linux's road to world domination could be bumpy at times.Here's how some early predictions about Linux have held up.
"Just a hobby" Hobbies can take you pretty far On August 25, 1991, a college student made a post on a Usenet group.That was hardly uncommon even in the early '90s, as Usenet was widely used at universities.But this particular message was important in hindsight.
The student was Linus Torvalds, then an undergraduate in computer science at the University of Helsinki in Finland.Torvalds announced his new project on comp.os.minux in an uncharacteristically modest manner: Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready.
I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.Minix was a Unix clone written by computer scientist Andre Tanenbaum designed to accompany a textbook that he'd written on operating system design.
Minix had a following because it came with the textbook and was thus much cheaper than a "real" Unix like XENIX on the PC, and it also ran on the IBM PCs and clones that most computer hobbyists and students actually had access to at the time instead of high-powered workstations.Torvalds made some amusing predictions about his "hobby" project as well.He thought that it would only support 386 and 486 processors and only run on PC hard disks.
Those turned out to be happily wrong: Linux has been ported to just about every CPU out there, thanks to Torvalds' ability to recruit armies of programmers over the internet."Linux is obsolete": Torvalds vs.Tanenbaum Monolithic kernels aren't as bad as they look While Linux was gaining a cult following of its own in the computing community in the early '90s because it was a Unix-like system with few restrictions and could be obtained at minimal cost, a tense debate emerged between Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix.
The main difference between the two was over the design of the kernel, or the heart of the operating system.Tanenbaum, as an academic computer scientist, favored the microkernel approach in vogue at the time and exemplified by the Mach kernel.A microkernel design has a small kernel that handles basic functions and uses smaller servers for much of the functionality, such as accessing disk drives or network devices.
Microkernels are theoretically clean and elegant, but real-world implementations, such as the GNU Hurd project, have suffered from performance and development difficulties, and the choice of a microkernel design is likely why HURD has been perpetually delayed.Linux pursues a "monolithic" design, where everything is in one big executable.This is in theory more difficult to maintain, but the advantage in real-world performance is that one big kernel means that the system doesn't have to send messages between different components.
The Linux kernel developers seem to recognize the complexity of a monolithic kernel and mitigate it through the use of kernel "modules" that can be loaded and unloaded while the kernel runs as necessary.Device drivers are typically modules.Tanenbaum made a post saying that Linux was "obsolete" due to its monolithic design, which Tanenbaum considered to be outmoded, and also cited Linux's initial support only for Intel chips as a deficiency, as Torvalds himself did.
The two got into a heated debate on Usenet, but in hindsight it seems that Linux, even with its "obsolete design," won.Again, this was more due to programmers working around the world to add new features to the Linux kernel and port it to new hardware."Year of the Linux desktop" It's not upon us yet, but maybe next year Close As soon as Linux appeared, people thought about it as an alternative to Windows.
While Unix-like systems existed before, they ran on machines that were well out of the price range of the average computer user.Even in the early '90s, people were wary of Microsoft's dominance of the PC.It's become a common joke to refer to the current year as the "Year of the Linux Desktop." While Linux is making more inroads, even in gaming, due to the Steam Deck, it still has a way to go.
Nothing lasts forever in the community, and some people still dream of Microsoft going the way of WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3, former market leaders in word processing and spreadsheets.Linux would kill proprietary Unix The Halloween Documents were right about one thing Microsoft's leaked "Halloween Documents" detailed how much of a threat the company considered Linux and open-source software to the company's bottom line.One thing that turned out to be accurate was that Linux distributions would displace the traditional Unix market on the PC.
In the '80s and '90s, there was a cottage industry of Unix ports like Microsoft's own XENIX, later taken over by the Santa Cruz Operation, and work-alikes like Coherent from the Mark Williams company.There's a reason why most of these names are long forgotten.Linux is free of charge, and in the days of dial-up, paid-for versions on floppy or CD were much cheaper than a typical OS installation.
Hobbyists and cash-strapped startups flocked to Linux for this reason over traditional Unix systems.Linux decimated the low-end traditional Unix market almost overnight by running on cheaper hardware than the RISC-based servers and workstations Unix typically ran on at the time.It's hard to predict the future Linux is an evolving system, even as mature as it is now.
People will keep making predictions, and people will find new problems to solve with Linux.It's good to look back and see how far Linux has come over the years.
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