The Unix operating system was conceived and implemented in 1969 at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in the United States by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Unix derived its name as a joke and reference to an experimental operating system that was slow and ineffective called MULTICS. It was first released in 1971 and was initially entirely written in assembly language, a common practice at the time. Later, in a key pioneering approach in 1973, Unix was re-written in the programming language C by Dennis Ritchie, (with exceptions to the kernel and I/O). The availability of an operating system written in a high-level language allowed easier portability to different computer platforms. With a legal glitch forcing AT&T to license the operating system’s source code, Unix quickly grew and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses.

Today Linux distributions are used in numerous domains, from embedded systems to supercomputers, and have secured a place in server installations with the popular LAMP application stack. Use of Linux distributions in home and enterprise desktops has been expanding. They have also gained popularity with various local and national governments. The federal government of Brazil is well known for its support for Linux. News of the Russian military creating their own Linux distribution has also surfaced, and has come to fruition as the G.H.ost Project. The Indian state of Kerala has gone to the extent of mandating for all state high schools to run Linux on their computers. China uses Linux exclusively as the operating system for its Loongson processor family to achieve technology independence. In Spain some regions have developed their own Linux distributions, which are widely used in education and official institutions, like gnuLinEx in Extremadura and Guadalinex in Andalusia. Portugal is also using its own Linux distribution Caixa Mágica, used in the Magalhães netbook and the e-escola government program. France and Germany have also taken steps towards the adoption of Linux.

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