In 1987, Professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum wrote a university textbook on operating system design , in which he proposed a new philosophy: that it should be possible to "see" and "touch" the inner workings of a real operating system as part of the student's hands-on learning. However, due to obvious copyright issues , Tanenbaum couldn't use any of the operating systems available at the time, so he decided to write a simple yet complete operating system and publish the source code in an appendix to his book.
Linus Torvalds
It wasn't long before fans of that system, which adopted the name Minix and largely simulated a UNIX system, appeared, running on a personal computer of the time that didn't even have a hard drive. One of those followers was Linus Torvalds.
Minix had significant design limitations, so Torvalds decided at one point to rewrite it to utilize the advanced features of the 80386 processor, which allowed for the implementation of virtual memory . Initially, this alternative to Minix was capable of very little, but thanks to the explosion of the Internet phenomenon that occurred around that time, hundreds of contributors from all over the world appeared and wrote all kinds of drivers for the new operating system. In this way, this new system, now known as Linux , became the most complete UNIX clone for personal computers. Furthermore, thanks to the use of GNU programs , Linux was provided with numerous applications and development tools without ever having to resort to commercial software.
And that's how our friends favorite operating system was born!