In the early 1960s, the world was dominated by Fortran (IBM's John Backus) for scientific and Cobol (IBM's Jean Summet and Department of Defense) for commercial use. Programs were written on paper, then perforated on cards, after which the results of their execution were waited for the whole day. Programming languages were considered important assistants and accelerators of the programming process.

In 1960, an international committee published the Algol 601 language specification. For the first time, a language was defined by well-defined constructs and a precise, formal syntax. Two years later, it became clear that some fixes and improvements were required. However, the main task was to expand the range of applications, since ALGOL 60 was intended only for scientific computing (computational mathematics). To work on this project, a Working Group (WG 2.1) was assembled under the auspices of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

Linux origin can be traced back to the 70s of the 20th century. Its starting point began from the first release of Unix operating system in 1969 by Bell Laboratories, subsidiary of AT & T in the U.S. Unix has become the basic one for a large number of industrial-grade operating systems. The most basic of them showed on this timescale:


Linux is mostly indebted to two projects - GNU and Minix.

GNU

The story of the GNU project started in September 1983. The founder of GNU project, Richard M. Stallman worked at that time in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stallman is considered as one of the most leading programmers of these days.