The Internet is now a household term in many countries. With otherwise
serious people beginning to joyride along the Information Superhighway,
computer networking seems to be moving toward the status of TV sets
and microwave ovens. The Internet has unusually high media coverage, and
social science majors are descending on Usenet newsgroups, online virtual
reality environments, and the Web to conduct research on the new
“Internet Culture.”
Of course, networking has been around for a long time. Connecting
computers to form local area networks has been common practice, even
at small installations, and so have long-haul links using transmission
lines provided by telecommunications companies. A rapidly growing
conglomerate of world-wide networks has, however, made joining the
global village a perfectly reasonable option for even small non-profit
organizations of private computer users. Setting up an Internet host
with mail and news capabilities offering dialup and ISDN access has
become affordable, and the advent of DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and
Cable Modem technologies will doubtlessly continue this trend.
Talking about computer networks often means talking about Unix. Of
course, Unix is not the only operating system with network
capabilities, nor will it remain a frontrunner forever, but it has
been in the networking business for a long time, and will surely
continue to be for some time to come.
What makes Unix particularly interesting to private users is that there has
been much activity to bring free Unix-like operating systems to the PC, such
as 386BSD, FreeBSD, and Linux.
Linux is a freely distributable Unix clone for personal computers. It
currently runs on a variety of machines that includes the Intel family
of processors, but also Motorola 680x0 machines, such as the Commodore
Amiga and Apple Macintosh; Sun SPARC and Ultra-SPARC machines; Compaq
Alphas; MIPS; PowerPCs, such as the new generation of Apple Macintosh;
and StrongARM, like the rebel.com Netwinder and 3Com Palm
machines. Linux has been ported to some relatively obscure platforms,
like the Fujitsu AP-1000 and the IBM System 3/90. Ports to other
interesting architectures are currently in progress in developers'
labs, and the quest to move Linux into the embedded controller space
promises success.
Linux was developed by a large team of volunteers across the Internet.
The project was started in 1990 by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish college
student, as an operating systems course project. Since that time,
Linux has snowballed into a full-featured Unix clone capable of
running applications as diverse as simulation and modeling programs,
word processors, speech recognition systems, World Wide Web browsers,
and a horde of other software, including a variety of excellent
games. A great deal of hardware is supported, and Linux contains a
complete implementation of TCP/IP networking, including SLIP, PPP,
firewalls, a full IPX implementation, and many features and some
protocols not found in any other operating system. Linux is powerful,
fast, and free, and its popularity in the world beyond the Internet is
growing rapidly.
The Linux operating system itself is covered by the GNU General Public
License, the same copyright license used by software developed by the Free
Software Foundation. This license allows anyone to redistribute or modify
the software (free of charge or for a profit) as long as all modifications
and distributions are freely distributable as well. The term “free
software” refers to freedom of application, not freedom of cost.
