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But, before we proceed, let's pause to deal with a question: what's with all the X's? Linux and Minix, yes, but investigators of the history of computing will also encounter Ultrix, AIX, HP-UX, and a number of other OS's that don't announce their parentage quite so openly. And indeed it is a matter of parentage, for all these systems derive from one Ur-father: Unix.
Unix was written in 1969, primarily by Ken Thompson, a programmer who worked for AT&T's Bell Labs. Thompson and his colleague Dennis Ritchie had been working on an ambitious multi-company project when the whole thing fell apart; but they thought that some of the work they had done on the project could be rescued and adapted for relatively small computers. Thus Unix was born.
And very soon Unix began to produce offspring, because the code which Thompson had written was made available to a wide range of programmers and software engineers in a wide range of universities, government agencies, and businesses. Improving Unix became a collective endeavor, and the OS got much better very quickly because of the many minds working on it. This experience would later become a key, perhaps the key, principle of the open source software movement: as one of that movements's key theorists, Eric Raymond, wrote, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"—that is, even the most intractable software problem will eventually yield if enough people devote themselves to solving it.
But soon the Unix world became fragmented: versions of Unix proliferated, each tailored to the needs of a particular company or adapted for a particular set of hardware. Unix ceased to be "open," as many of these companies refused to share their versions; a spirit of proprietary ownership replaced the collective, cooperative spirit of Unix's early days. Indeed, in the 1970s a conviction began to emerge that the "intellectual property" embodied in a piece of software—its code, the instructions it gives to a piece of hardware, written by persons just as novels are written by persons—had an economic value that the first generations of computer professionals either had not noticed or had not cared about.
Such neglect may seem odd to us, knowing as we do the vast fortunes that have been made in software, but in those days computers were used by very few, chiefly in universities and the government. Programmers paid by those institutions could not make more money by keeping the code they write secret, so they freely shared it with others. Only with the great expansion of business computing and the advent of the PC did it become evident that any software that enabled non-experts actually to use a computer—a rather forbidding machine, after all—pretty much determined the value of the machine itself. One of the first computer professionals to see this point was a fellow named Bill Gates: in 1976 he wrote an "Open Letter to Hobbyists" to protest unlicensed use of some software (a version of the programming language Basic for the MITS Altair, the first personal computer) written by him and his partners in the young company then known as Micro-Soft.
Fragmentation and proprietorship; these were the enemies for many ambitious programmers in the 1980s. When Andrew Tannenbaum wrote Minix, he employed the basic principles that underlay Unix; the ancestry of his OS was very clear to all knowledgeable observers. But he couldn't use any preexisting Unix code without being in violation of copyright; he had to write Minix from scratch. Linus Torvalds was in the same position when he started coding Linux. (But for all practical purposes both Minix and Linux are versions of Unix; they use very similar commands, and anyone with Unix experience is perfectly at home in Minix, almost so in Linux.) Both programmers made their work available to the community of hackers, seeking affirmation where possible, correction where necessary. But at that point their paths diverged, and the divergence explains why Linus Torvalds and his OS Linux are increasingly famous and influential, while Andrew Tannenbaum is little known outside the circle of computer professionals.
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