What is Linux and why is it used?
In: Technology
UNIX was an operating system developed by AT&T back in the 1960s. It was used on mainframe systems and workstations. But licensing fee was quite expensive to use. The -ix/-ux suffix was popular on similar operating systems, Minix, Xenix, AIX, HPUX, etc. In the early 1990s Linus Torvalds wrote his own UNIX-like operating system for Intel 386 systems and released it open source (I remember the original post n Usenet..). It was very basic at the time, didn’t support many peripherals, it didn’t run on my disk controller for example. Other people started contributing to it and it took off from there. Now it supports lots of different architectures and devices.
It’s used pretty much everywhere now. Those huge data centers used by Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc all run Linux. Android phones run a version of Linux, some cable boxes or smart TVs, airline in-seat video systems.
Latest Answers