First off, if you have ten minutes to increase your knowledge and proficiency in computers read this entire post.  If not, just skip down to the final section (What is Ubuntu?) for an overview of what Ubuntu is and why their logo (the red, yellow, orange circle dealy above) is being used on this site for the month of May.

History of Operating Systems

A lot of people that have grown up using Microsoft Windows (or even the Mac operating systems) are addicted to the ease of point and click.  The graphical user interface (GUI) of Windows makes it easy to use a computer… you move the mouse around the desktop and click on icons of programs you want to run.  However, these GUIs are newborns in the life of computing.  The earliest computers came into existence in the 1930s and by the 1940s were being used to decipher German war time codes.  Until the popular release of Windows 3.1 in 1992 the graphical user interface was practically non-existent.  Before then people were using text user interfaces (TUI) to tell their computers what to do.  Before that people were actually using paper cards, linked together in chains, to operate their computers.

Early computer engineers created a solution that combined many smaller programming styles, languages, etc. into one rather robust (for their time) operating system/platform called Unix.  This eventually gave way to Linux (more user friendly than Unix), Windows and the Mac operating systems (much more user friendly than Unix).  Mac has recently redone their operating system to such a degree that it has reverted back closer to its Unix roots and now closely resembles Linux.  Windows, as much as Microsoft wants you to think differently, is pretty much a derivative/break-off of Unix and thus very closely related to Linux.  While Windows captured the majority of market share in the early 1990s, Linux began to gain popularity in the mid 90s with the release of Redhat (a distribution/derivative of Linux).  However, because Linux is created by the community and is most often free to use (unlike Windows which now costs between $90 and $200 to use it on one computer) it has not received nearly as large a marketing push as Windows has.  Another setback of early versions of Linux is that it was only Continue Reading »