Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Linus Torvalds and Linux by Matthiew Feder

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was born on December 28, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland. When Torvalds was little he didn't pay much attention to the common things you see boys interested in, sports, girls, and other activities involving him being social. He spent most of his time on the computer. When his grandpa bought him his first computer he was very bored with it and became experimenting with coding languages. He first dabbled in basic languages and then moved on to the more complex languages. Programming became a passion of his very quickly. Later down the road, just like his parents, he enrolled at the University of Helsinki for computer science. He bought a new computer with the MS-DOS system. He was very unhappy with it and tried to get UNIX on it, however, could not because it was too expensive. He had the option of MINIX but found many disadvantages in it. A couple of the major disadvantages of MINIX were all of the source code was not made public, it didn't have the performance and capabilities that UNIX had, and there was a licensing fee. He thought it would be a fun to create his own operating system. In Finland, education is free and that makes people less pressured to finish in four years so he decided to take a break from his studies and work full-time on creating a new operating system. However, he did go back and get a master's later on.
On September 17, 1991 he finished the first version, 0.01, of Linux. A little less than a month later on October 5, 1991 he released version 0.02 of Linux which was considered the official version. This is really when Linux became a huge group project around the world. Let's skip 22 years ahead to where Linux is today. Linux is considered to be very stable especially on a network server. Corporate loves to use it on their network for two big reasons, one being that the down time is very small, and two being the low cost. As some of you may know if a businesses' network is down for even a little time they lose a lot of revenue, so a network that doesn't need any down time can be very valuable. Another point I want to make is the amount of viruses that there are for Linux. Out of 100% of viruses 99% goes to Windows and only .05% goes to Linux and the other .05% goes to Mac OS. The biggest difference between the three operating systems is the open source code. You cannot customize the other two like you can do with Linux. Here is a list of the advantages and disadvantages of Linux.
Advantages       
                                                         
1.     Very Stable
2.     Easy to install
3.     Not likely to be effected by computer Malware
4.     Free
5.     A lot of free software
6.     Technical support

            Disadvantages 
1.     A lot of Windows programs aren't compatible
2.     It takes some time how to learn it
3.     Less peripheral hardware drivers 

I don't think I would consider Linus to be the greatest programmer in the world. I honestly believe that there is no one that considered the best. I think many people have their strengths and weaknesses at different things. Linux is a perfect example of this. Linus could have never done this alone. So many other people helped him make this what it is today. 

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1 comment:

  1. Hmmph.Iv'e found different dates for the versions of Linux in my research. I think yours may be more accurate.

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