Linux Timeline By LWN and LJ

A reader wrote to us with the link that Linux Journal has put together a Linux Timeline. Kinda nice to walk down memory lane - and think about what was on peoples' mind at each major point. Of course, if I see the original letter Linus wrote at the beginning one more time...*grin*

Comments

Timeline!

[Anonymous Coward]

2005 : Open Source programmers get laid.
2006 : All Open Source development halts.

unix timeline

[dizco]

This has been posted before, but here's a nifty history-of-unix timeline

Also the book 'a quarter century of unix' is a great read, if a bit dated.

--sean

They forgot April 1991!

[teamhasnoi]

Bill Gates wakes at 2:25 in the morning, weeping for no apparent reason.

Steve Ballmer imitates a monkey and gets big laughs at at a party.

John Ashcroft gets the shivers, and puts down the Peep-Hole magazine he was reading in sudden unease.

Linux timeline

[Rupert]

July 2002: Linux Journal still not capable of withstanding a slashdotting.

Re:Wars

[Arandir]

Linux didn't start out as an alternative to Windows. It started out as an alternative to Minix and proprietary unices. Linus wanted a unix on his computer. GNU was grossly incomplete. BSD was being mugged by AT&T. Everything else was proprietary. So he started his own.

It wasn't until the age of Slashdot when a significant minority of Linux users (not coders) decided that Linux had to be an alternative or replacement for Windows.

Starting 1991?

[mpawlo]

I am sorry, but how can you start a Linux timeline in 1991? I would have started much earlier on MIT's lab for artificial intelligence. Does anyone really believe that Linux would have been such a success story without its license?

Regards

Mikael

Re:Wars

[no reason to be here]

perhaps more proper to say, GNU started out as an alternative to proprietary code. Linux then came along and took some GNU stuff to make it completely usable, and was an alternative to proprietary software. not so much Unix of M$, just un-free software.

Who coined "Open Source"?

[ke4roh]

February 1998
Eric Raymond and friends come up with the term "open source". They apply for trademark status and put up the opensource.org web site.

I thought that looked suspiciously recent for the term "open source", so, in a few minutes of Google groups searching, the earliest reference I found was October 1989, in a post by Chris McDonald from White Sands Missile Range, but he was not talking specifically about computer program source code - just information.

In December 1990, folks were discussing "open source" software, particularly BSD. Thad Florian quoted Kent Paul Dolan using the term, then used it himself.