If you are interested in the history of Linux, you should start from UNIX.

After dropped out of the project Multics by AT&T, the new operating system UNIX implemented by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Lab in 1969 and the first release of UNIX came out in 1970. Later they rewrote it in C programming language to make it portable.

In 1977, the 6th edition of Unix developed by the Computer System Research Group CSRG from University of California, Berkeley named as Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).

In 1983, the GNU project started by Richard Stallman with the goal of a free operating system like UNIX. To fulfill his dream, he wrote GUN General Public License (GPL).

In 1985, the first x86 microprocessor released as 80386 with the 32-bit instruction set and Paging technology with memory management.

In 1991, the new project began by Linus Torvalds, a computer science student of University of Helsinki later is known as Linux kernel. The project was developed on MINIX using GNU C Compiler.

Linus Torvalds announced about his Linux kernel project at Usenet posting to the newsgroup “comp.os.minix” on 25th August 1991.

Hello everybody out there using minix-

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it something (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have

-Linus Torvalds

According to Torvalds, Linux gets importance in 1992 when the X Window System was ported to Linux by Orest Zborowski, which enable GUI feature in Linux first time.

Nowadays, Linux is the most popular operating system, and most of the operating systems are designed on Linux kernel only.