History, Mission, Growth

The beginnings of Microsoft started when Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a partnership to produce the programming language, BASIC. The rest is history. In 1976, the two formed a partnership and registered the trade name “Microsoft”. As most of us know, Microsoft has become the largest and most well known name associated with software and computers in general. The Windows operating system (OS) is the most used operating system in the world. In 1991, the “grassroots” OS named Linux was created by a student in Finland. His name is Linus Torvalds and his motivation behind creating this software came from the lack of hardware support with the current operating system the school was using, UNIX. Thus, the name Linux came to be. The rise of this software was unexpected. Since Torvalds was using GNU’s free public software to create his Linux operating system, he felt that the operating system as a whole should be free to the public. In 1991, Torvalds posted the source code of Linux on his school’s File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server for all students to view, use, and reformat to their liking. Unknowingly, Torvalds had created “a new paradigm for designing software” called open-source software. Essentially, open-source software was software that could be downloaded from the school’s FTP server and be re-programmed by anyone who so chooses. With this came an influx of computer hobbyists and software programmers who downloaded and updated the Linux software, as a hobby, to their liking so that it would be optimized for their specific application. From that point on the growth of Linux was up to the general public. Those who chose to perform modifications would do the programming and then submit the changes to Torvalds. The public responded well as new changes came in constantly, which allowed Torvalds to continuously update Linux