August 25, 1991 After five months of development, a 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced Teleconference Comp.os.minix about creating a working prototype of the new Linux operating system for which the completion of porting Bash 1.08 and GCC 1.40 was noted. The first publication of the Linux kernel was presented on September 17. The kernel 0.0.1 had a size of 62 KB in a compressed form and contained about 10 thousand rows of the source code. The modern Linux kernel has more than 28 million rows of code. According to the study conducted in 2010 on the order of the European Union, the approximate cost of developing from scratch, similar to the modern Linux kernel, would amount to more than a billion US dollars (the calculation was made when there were 13 million code lines in the nucleus), by estimates – more than 3 billion.
Linux kernel was created under the impression of the Minix operating system, which did not suit Linus his limited license. Subsequently, when Linux became a well-known project, ill-wishers tried to blame Linus in direct copying of some MINIX subsystems. The attack reflected Andrew Tannenbaum, author Minix, who instructed one of the students to conduct a detailed comparison of the Minix code and the first public versions of Linux. Results Studies showed the presence of only four insignificant coincidence of code blocks caused by POSIX and ANSI C requirements .
Initially, Linus thought to call the Freax core, from the words “free”, “freak” and x (UNIX). But the name “Linux” the kernel received Ari Lemmke with a light hand, which at the request of Linus placed the kernel at the University’s FTP server, calling the directory with the not “Freax” archive, as Torvald asked, and “Linux”. It is noteworthy that the enterprising Deeler William Della Croce was able to register Linux trademark and wanted to collect deductions, but later changed his mind and transferred all the rights to Linus’s trademark. The official Mascot Linux-kernel, Penguin TUX, was chosen as a result of Competitions , held in 1996. TUX name is decrypted as Torvalds Unix.
Growth speaker code base (number of ra rows of the source code) kernel:
- 0.0.1 – September 1991, 10 thousand lines of code;
- 1.0.0 – March 1994, 176 thousand lines of code;
- 1.2.0 – March 1995, 311 thousand lines of code;
- 2.0.0 – June 1996, 778 thousand lines of code;
- 2.2.0 – January 1999, 1.8 million codes;
- 2.4.0 – January 2001, 3.4 million codes;
- 2.6.0 – December 2003, 5.9 million codes;
- 2.6.28 – December 2008, 10.2 million lines of code;
- 2.6.35 – August 2010, 13.4 million lines of code;
- 3.0 – August 2011, 14.6 million lines of code.
- 3.5 – July 2012, 15.5 million rows of code.
- 3.10 – July 2013, 15.8 million lines of code;
- 3.16 – August 2014, 17.5 million lines of code;
- 4.1 – June 2015, 19.5 million codes;
- 4.7 – July 2016, 21.7 million lines of code;
- 4.12 – July 2017, 24.1 million lines of code;
- 4.18 – August 2018, 25.3 million rows of code.
- 5.2 – July 2019, 26.55 million lines of code.