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Unix operating system released
- Authored at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna
- Written in Assembly
- Given freely to whoever asked for it
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Unix rewritten in C
- Unix rewritten in C by Ritchie
- Made it easier to port to different platforms
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Unix enters marketplace as proprietary operating system
- Occurred when AT&T was no longer required not to enter business with computer products
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Work on GNU Project started
- Founded by Richard Stallman
- Aimed to create a free Unix-compatible software system
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Linus Torvalds takes a Unix course at University of Helsinki
- Torvalds' introduction to Unix
- Frustrated by lack of usable free and open source operating systems
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Work begins on "Freax/Linux" kernel
- Torvalds initially named his project Freax
- Later renamed to Linux
- Intended only for use with specific hardware, not expected to be ported
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X Window system ported to Linux
- X Window allowed the creation of a graphical user interface (GUI)
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Integration with GNU Project tools and GPL
- Used GNU tools to implement various tools, like shells, compilers, etc.
- Released under the GNU General Public License
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Linux mascot "Tux" first adopted
- The very recognizable "Tux" penguin logo is adopted as an official mascot
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KDE released
- The first "advanced desktop environment" released for Linux
- Was controversial due to use of proprietary Qt-Toolkit
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Major companies begin supporting Linux-based systems
- Many companies, such as Oracle and IBM, announce support for Linux
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GNOME Desktop Environment Released
- Free and open-source competitor to KDE released for Linux
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Oracle releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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Dell begins selling laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed
- Ubuntu is a very popular Linux distribution
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Android released
- Sponsored by Google
- Mobile operating system based on modified Linux kernel