windows h& linux history

Hi,

Linux started out as a terminal emulator because apparently the Minix one sucked. Eventually it grew parts of an OS, like a disk driver and file system driver, so he decided to make an OS. As a poster has pointed out, there is a great book called "Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" by Torvalds. The 70 pages in that book detailing the early days of Linux are worth it. :) The rest of the book isn't worth reading as far as Linux's development goes.

Linus bought a brand new 386 system at that time on hire-purchase which was, if I recall, a 386 DX33 with 4MB RAM and a disk with perhaps no more than 150MB capacity. It was very expensive.

Linus advises that the way to develop an OS is to write the system calls and focus on them. They are the heart of a kernel.

I don't know how MS developed Windows, but the early versions ran on top of DOS and we can infer they did it the hard way by rebooting and rebooting... ;) The original Windows versions were very primitive and as far as GUIs go was probably simple and not much of a hbuttle to develop. NT on the other hand was a complete re-write.