Explianing the Relationship between Unix and Linux Historically

Warning: a very short piece

• The Bell Labs in the late 1960' and 1970s was a legendary innovation hub as wonderfully described in The Bell Labs Org Chart (apart from C language and Unix OS):

I was curious — how does Big Tech research compare to Bell Labs? I can’t name a single thing from Google X or Amazon 126, Apple or Microsoft Research departments. Perhaps a faint idea of drones deliveries, balloon weather projects, AR/VR tech, failed chat apps, quantum something, and a lot of PR. Listing Bell Labs’ major inventions really put things into perspective: Laser, Solar-cells, Communications Satellites, Touch-tone telephones, Transistor, UNIX, C language, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Cellular Telephones, Data Networking, Charge-coupled device (CCD), Information Theory, Television, Sound motion pictures, and a total of 8 Nobel Prizes in Physics.

• Unix was Originally intended for programmers of PDP-11 could develop their software without running into arbitrary resource and access limits
• C was among the earliest languages that could be made to compile on Unix
• By 1973, Unix 4 was rewritten in the more fully developed C
• This made the effect of eventually making Unix portable, i.e. independent from hardwarde
• Over time, in_house licenced closed-source versions of Unix were created
• E.g. version called BSD (Berkely Software Distribution) which remains important software distro until these days (also from open-sourced Free BSD)
• E.g./Later, The close-sourced MacOS X is built on top of open source FreeBSD
• Therefore, Apple is sponsor of CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), which is used across many Unix-like systems (Linux, too) to manage printers
• There are 2 independent open-source streams of Unix-like OSes
• Linux (1991)
• Minix (1987)

MINIX is known from a major spat between Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds. The two were actually independent and very differently oriented descendants from UNIX. And Tanenbaum had had a particular philosophy about making everything small and elegant. And Linus was just hacking around without much particular sense for what is the right way of doing things. And that, yeah, I think there’s a very, very famous, or infamous, debate that went on in the very early days of Linux. But yeah, Tanenbaum developed MINIX. That was actually — I think he did that after I had graduated.

— From Oral History of Guido van Rossum (The creator of Python, watch the whole thing!)

• However, Neither of them has any direct links to the original Unix source code
• Indeed, they are built to perform much like a UNIX system
• But they have kernels that contain purely original open-source code
• Minix3 was written by Tanenbaum to run Unix-like systems on IBM PCs on the 1980s in Amsterdam (Python Founder, Guy van Rossum is surely quoting him)
• But it was Linus Torwalds 1991 release of Linux under the licence of GNU (Stallmans) that opened up floodgate of potential
• Note, again there is No Unix Code in Linux, which is made to be as portable as possible