In this lesson, we will give a brief history of Linux, concentrating on the first decade or so of its life. When it grew from infancy to a large platform. Linux is now 27 years old [as of 2018]. It was first announced by Linus Torvalds, then a student in Finland, who was using the Minix operating system, created by Professor Andrew Tanenbaum at the University of Amsterdam. When he became frustrated both by its licensing in its procedures for having changes made. He posted the message which is shown here, to a Usenet newsgroup asking for help. The name Linux was not proposed by Linus himself. He felt it was too egotistical but eventually, it settled down into what was used. The original release of Linux had its own license, but quickly, Linus moved over to the General Public License or GPL, where it has remained ever since. As much as his technical qualities, it is the adoption of a license which made it easy to grow a community of large number to work on Linux that enabled its success. Linux needed many other components in order to constitute a complete operating system, most of which were supplied by the GNU project in an early stage, including compilers, debuggers, et cetera. The first really usable Linux distributions, started around 1992 and they're still in use; in particular, Slackware, Debian, the predecessor of SUSE and Red Hat. In 2000, the OSDL, the Open Source Development Lab, was founded in Portland, Oregon, as an independent organization to promote and optimize Linux. Linus himself became a fellow working for the OSDL. In 2007, there was a major change when it united with another group to form The Linux Foundation, which is now 11 years old [as of 2018] and whose mission is to protect, improve and standardize Linux, with support from many major corporate clients and sponsors as well as a lot of smaller organizations and companies. There was a big push in 2000 when IBM invested over a billion dollars in Linux, and when Oracle first imported its database to Linux, and ever since then, it has grown exponentially. There are many independent developers still contributing to Linux, but the large majority of the people who work on Linux work for either a major Linux distribution or a major software or hardware company, and this is their full time job. While Linux started on the Intel family of computers, PCs, it's grown to handle many many architectures, almost every kind of computer on the planet, and works in everything from very small embedded devices including watches, to the vast majority of the world's super computers. In fact, recently, that number approached 100 percent. So that's a brief history of Linux.