History of Linux cheap and popular Intel 386 architecture for personal computers. In the early nineties a commercial UNIX operating system for Intel 386 PCs was too expensive for private users. These factors and the lack of a widely adopted, free kernel provided the impetus for Torvalds' starting his project. He has stated that if either the GNU Hurd or 386BSD kernels had been available at the time, he likely would not have written his own. In 1991, while studying computer science at University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds began a project that later became the Linux kernel. He wrote the program specifically for
SHARE Operating System SHARE Operating System The SHARE Operating System (SOS) was created in 1959 as an improvement on the General Motors GM-NAA I/O operating system, the first operating system, by the SHARE user group. The main target was to improve the sharing of programs over GM-NAA I/O. SHARE Operating System provided new methods to manage buffers and input/output devices, and, like GM-NAA I/O, allowed execution of programs written in assembly language. Initially, it worked on IBM 709 computer and its transistorized compatible successor the IBM 7090. A series of articles describing innovations in the system appears in the April, 1959, Journal of