A Historical Look At The First Linux Kernel

LinuxFan writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating article about the first Linux kernel, version 0.01, complete with source code and photos of Linus Torvalds as a young man attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally planned to call the kernel "Freax," and in his first announcement noted, "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." He also stressed that the kernel was very much tied to the i386 processor, "simply, I'd say that porting is impossible." Humble beginnings."

Comments

No sooner had I finished compiling...

[kaleco]

...than Gentoo using kernel 0.02 was made available.

Official kernel development strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

"When the first kernel pops, then toss in about 1/2 cup of open source developers and shake vigorously until the popping dies down. You don't want to leave it on until you hear nothing, because then it's sure to be burnt."

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

that that Torvalds guys project never amounted to anything useful.

Linus even wrote a book about it

[bomanbot]

To get an even deeper look into the beginnings of the Linux Kernel, I like the book that Linus wrote which is called Just for Fun - The story of an accidental revolutionary (ISBN 1-58799-080-6, google the rest).

It contains the entire back history how Linux began as a side project and of course the famous spat with Andrew Tanenbaum over Minix and Linux and I found it to be a good (if very nerdy) read.

But the pictures in the article? Just sad, he reminds me so much of myself ;-)

Oh No!

[MyLongNickName]

He looks just like Bill Gates at that age!

At least two people agree on 640kB

[Centurix]

From memory.c

* NOTE 2!! When from==0 we are copying kernel space for the first
  * fork(). Then we DONT want to copy a full page-directory entry, as
  * that would lead to some serious memory waste - we just copy the
  * first 160 pages - 640kB. Even that is more than we need, but it
  * doesn't take any more memory - we don't copy-on-write in the low
  * 1 Mb-range, so the pages can be shared with the kernel. Thus the
  * special case for nr=xxxx.

uh huh

[thatskinnyguy]

I have a poster in my office with all the lines of code for kernel 0.0.1. It's uber-geek. A must have for most slashdotters!

Well

[akkarin]

"Oh, Linux will *never* have a fan base. Never. Ever. Period."
- Bill Gates

Embarassing change of context

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one twisted enough to have fixed for a moment on the once perfectly innocent sentence : "Could someone please try to finger me from overseas?"... :)

Re:Note the mention of GNU

[sayfawa]

Maybe if the GNU folks had only been working on a kernel instead of also doing the hundreds of other programs as well, they would have made more headway with HURD. And if Linus had been trying to do a whole OS and not just the kernel, Linux the kernel would still be early in development.

The mention of GNU should merely point out how important the GNU is in GNU/Linux. As Linus said in the post: Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. These are separate parts and may be under a stricter (or even looser) copyright. Most of the tools used with linux are GNU software and are under the GNU copyleft.

Re:Note the mention of GNU

[Just Some Guy]

This is an example why open source projects are more effective when they're driven by pragmatism and not politics.

The problem is that politics is interested in you even if you're not interested in it. The pragmatic approach involves taking politics into account even if you're personally bored to tears by the subject.