History in Brief

1983 Richard Stallman (RMS) started GNU, as a project to create a complete free operating system. As part of this work, he wrote the GNU General Public License (GPL). However, the GNU kernel, called Hurd, failed to attract enough attention from developers leaving GNU incomplete. 

In 1991, in Helsinki, Linus Torvalds began a project that later became the Linux. It was a modest offshoot of MINUX, a model operating system written by Andrew.S.Tanenbaum. He wrote the program specifically for the hardware he was using and independent of an operating system because he wanted to use the functions of his new PC with an 80386 processor.

Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.