Linux – The Kid From The Peanuts Cartoon?
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
No, Linux is not the kid from the Peanuts Cartoon. Linux is an operating system like Windows or Apple’s MacOS.
You have probably never heard of Linux and you may be wondering why you would even want to know about it. Learning a little bit about Linux may save you money if your computer is getting old OR if Microsoft won’t let you upgrade your computer from Windows 10 to Windows 11.
In the late 1960s, Bell Labs (if you are old enough you can still remember the Bell Phone Companies) was working on a new, monolithic operating system they called Minix. By 1969, Bell Labs realized that the huge operating system they were developing was too big to work. However, a couple of the engineers working on it created a smaller version of the operating system and were able to run it on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP computer. They called the system UNIX.
Digital Equipment Corporation was successful in selling their PDP computers running Unix to universities and colleges. Many of the computer science students in the 1970s and 1980s learned computing on a Unix system. HP, Sun Microsystems and even IBM began making computers that ran Unix.
A Finnish computer student, named Linus Torvald, loved working on Unix systems, but there were no PCs that ran Unix. So, in the early 1990s, Torvald began writing his own “clone” of the Unix operating system that would run on a PC. In a play on words, Linus Torvald called his operating system Linux: a combination of his name and Unix.
A lot of computer engineers and hobbyists loved the idea and since Linux was free they started installing it on their PCs and running Linux instead of Windows. Linux has continued to grow and now runs on PCs and Macintosh computers. Many web servers around the world are running on Linux.
The Android operating system, used on the majority of smartphones, is a variation of Linux. Chrome OS is also a variation of Linux. Many devices, like Dish Networks DVR, run variations of Linux.
Compared to Windows or MacOS, Linux is smaller and requires fewer computer resources. Over the years Windows has kept growing and requires bigger, faster computers. Many people have abandoned perfectly good older PCs and laptops because Windows became too slow.
Linux works well on even older PCs and laptops.
