Reference: http://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/History_of_Linux
http://oreilly.com/catalog/debian/chapter/book/ch01_02.html

History of Linux

Linux is an operating system that was created by a young student, Linus Torvalds
and it was been invented by himself in 1991. He had been using Minix, a non-free Unix-
like system during his studied and he began writing his own kernel so that he can use the
functions of his new PC with an 80386 processor. The underlying GNU Project was
launched in 1983 by Richard Stallman to develop a Unix-compatible operating system
called GNU which intended to be entirely free software. Linux which has basic design
and called as version 0.01 was developed and released on September under the GNU
system to produce a complete free operating system. On October 5th, 1991, he announced
the released of version 0.02 in a Usenet posting to the "comp.os.minix.” newsgroup . The
development of Linux was continued to be improved and started to be used in large-scale
applications such as networking, database serving, web hosting and it can be used by
anyone regardless of his or her knowledge of computers. Linux was announced to have
an official mascot, the penguin named Tux, suggested by James
Hughes which was selected by Linus Torvalds to represent the image
he associates with the operating system, Linux.

Features of Linux

Linux have many great features compared to other operating system. First of all, it
is obviously free and can be downloaded by anyone. It offers users with user-friendly
interface that makes it more interesting and mostly compatible to some software. It is
multitasking which can run several programs running at the same time and can have
several users on the same machine at the same time (multi-user). Besides that, it has
excellent multiprocessing capabilities and has memory protection between processes, so
that one program can not bring the whole system down. In Linux, all source code
including the whole kernel, all drivers, development tools and all user programs is readily
available and can be modified by anyone. The performance of this operating system is
higher than the other operating system. The users are more satisfied using Linux. It also
has a special file system called UMSDOS which allows Linux to be installed on a DOS
file system. It supports for many national or customized keyboards and it is fairly easy to
add new ones dynamically. Furthermore, it provides advanced disk management (RAID)
which makes it possible to automatically duplicate stored data in several hard drives. This
makes the data storage becomes more reliable which means if one hard drives failed to
retrieve the data, it can read the data from another hard drives.
Differences between Linux compared to Windows.

Linux Windows
-Customers need to pay if users purchase a -Customers need to pay ongoing licensing
packaged commercial distribution or it is fees or royalties.
free if downloaded.
-Commonly familiar to the users that use this -More commercial and well known
operating system
-Open source which can readily available -Cannot be read and modified.
and modifiable.
-Hard to be learn and use. -Much easier to use.
-Better performance. -Lower performance.
-Fast and easy installation. -Takes time to install.
- Network friendliness - Nice and simple graphic users interface.
- Stability and flexibility. - More secure.

-Easier to get help regarding it since it is an - Manage resources easier (Windows Task
open source Manager)