THAT’S NOT LINUX!

There have been plenty of other kernels and operating systems, many open source, but all languishing in the footnotes of history. The original UNIX releases had their day, but the POSIX standard they established, the shackles and legalities of overbearing license restrictions, and the desire of coders to work on freed code were all too much.

Minix could have been its own Linux, being the inspiration for it, and it is still maintained, but again original license limitations and possibly a lack of ambition meant it was always more of an academic curio.

We haven’t yet mentioned the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which is a success today in its own right—it powers the modern Apple Darwin kernel—and followed Linux in many steps, shares a lot of the same libraries and tools, but was tied up in legalities in the early 1990s, which probably allowed Linux to gain the weight of developer focus.

BeOS is the best OS you’ve (probably) never heard of. Launched in

1995, it absolutely shamed Windows 95 and macOS at the time. Initially developed on PowerPC systems, the idea being to replace macOS, it never took off and ceased development around 2001. Of course, www.haiku-os. org is an open source implementation of the BeOS API, so it lives on.

MikeOS ( http://mikeos.sourceforge.net) is an x86 OS written in assembly by ex- LinuxFormat disc editor Mike Saunders. It’s an opensource, 16-bit, real-mode OS aimed at teaching how an OS works.

Last but not least, Temple OS ( http://templeos.org) is an incredible public domain work by coder Terry A Davis, sadly deceased. Suffering from schizophrenia, Davis was compelled to write HolyC and Temple OS.