Linux Administration Handbook 1.3

1.3 LINUX IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Linux 历史背景

Linux originated in 1991 as a personal project of Linus Torvalds, a Finnish graduate student. He originally conceived the project as a modest offshoot of Minix, a model operating system written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. However, Linux generated substantial interest in the world at large, and the kernel soon took on a life of its own. By exploiting the power of cooperative development, Linus was able to tackle a much more ambitious agenda. Kernel version 1.0 was released in 1994; as of this writing (September 2006), the most recent stable version of the Linux kernel is 2.6.17 .

Linux 是 1991 年 Linus Torvalds 个人项目，一个芬兰研究生。他本来构思这个项目作为 Minix 的最新旁支， Andrew S. Tanenbaum 写的一个模型操作系统。但是， Linux 在世界范围内产生了大量的兴趣，内核不久就有了自己的开发。得益于合作开发， Linus 抓住更有前景计划。 1.0 内核 1994 年发布，本书写作时（ 2006 年 9 月），最新的 Linux 内核稳定版本是 2.6.17 。

Because Linux owes much to its UNIX ancestors, it’s not quite fair to locate the dawn of the Linux era in 1991. The history of UNIX goes back several decades to 1969, when UNIX originated as a research project at AT&T Bell Labs. In 1976, UNIX was made available at no charge to universities and thus became the basis of many operating systems classes and academic research projects.

由于 Linux 有太多和其祖先 UNIX 相同，在 1991 年不能很公平的定位 Linux 新纪元的到来。 UNIX 的历史回溯几十年到 1969 ，当时 UNIX 源于 AT&T 贝尔实验室的研究项目。 1976 年， UNIX 在大学里免费使用，并成为许多操作系统的基础，及学会研究项目。

Berkeley UNIX began in 1977 when the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California , Berkeley , and licensed code from AT&T. Berkeley’s releases (called BSD, for Berkeley Software Distribution) started with 1BSD for the PDP-11 and culminated in 1993 with 4.4BSD. As UNIX gained commercial acceptance, the price of source licenses rose rapidly. Eventually, Berkeley set the long-term goal of removing AT&T’s code from BSD, a tedious and time-consuming process. Before the work could be completed, Berkeley lost funding for operating systems research and the CSRG was disbanded.

Berkeley UNIX 始于 1977 年，当时加州的伯克利大学的 CSRG 从 AT&T 授权到源码。伯克利版本（叫做 BSD ）起于为 PDP-11 开发的 1BSD ， 1993 年的 4.4BSD 到达顶点。随着 UNIX 获得越来越多的商业支票，源证书的价格也飞速上涨。最终，伯克利制订了把 AT&T 的代码从 BSD 中移除的长期计划，繁重而耗时的过程。此工作结束前，伯克利失去了操作系统研究的基金， CSRG 解散。

Before disbanding, the CSRG released its final collection of AT&T-free code, known as 4.4BSD-Lite. Most current versions of BSD UNIX (including FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS and OpenBSD) claim the 4.4BSD-Lite package as their grandparent.

解散前， CSRG 发布了其最终收集的 AT&T 的免费代码，即 BSD4.4 精简版。多数现行 BSD UNIX 版本声明 4.4BSD 精简版包是其祖先。

Most other major versions of UNIX (including HP-UX and Solaris) are descendants of the original AT&T lineage. Linux doesn’t share code with the AT&T or BSD flavors of UNIX, but from a functional perspective it falls somewhere between the two.

其他主要的 UNIX 版本（包括 HP-UX 和 Solaris ）是早起 AT&T 直系子孙。 Linux 没有与 AT&T 或其他 UNIX 共享代码，但是从功能远景考虑，，其与这两者共享些东西。