LINUX HARDWARE
The hardware that made Linux great
To kick off our new series, Mike Bedford delves into the now largely forgotten 80386, which is where Linux first saw the light of day.
Part One!
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OUR EXPERT
Mike Bedford
only discovered Linux quite late in his computing journey, so learning more about the hardware that gave birth to Linux provided an interesting diversion.
Today’s desktop PC market is dominated by AMD and Intel processors, so there can be
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little doubt over what ISA (instruction set architecture) the majority of Linux users are employing. This, of course, is the x86, and according to a recent survey of Linux gamers conducted by Steam, 73.6% use AMD chips and 29.6% use Intel CPUs. Beyond gamers, ARM also gets a look-in, of course, thanks to the Raspberry Pi and Android deployed on the dizzying array of mobile devices.
Despite this, it would be far short of the mark to consider Linux as restricted to a particular family of hardware, as is the case with Microsoft Windows. By way of contrast, Linux is almost certainly the operating system that has been – and probably still is – available for the widest range of hardware. In our new series on the hardware that made Linux great, we’re going to examine this broad spectrum of hardware. This will take us from one extreme to the other, that’s from the cheapest to the most powerful of computers, and with lots more in between. As a taster of where we’re going, the series will comprise articles on the workstations and servers of the ’80s and ’90s, home computers and supercomputers. And we’ll conclude with an investigation of today’s state-of-play. In this first article, we take a look at the hardware that gave Linux birth. And despite our reference to the vast diversity of Linux hardware, that initial hardware was a PC fitted with an Intel 80386 processor. Bizarrely, therefore, the x86 ISA that dominates the desktop today is where it all started 34 years ago. But that statement rather downplays all those years of x86 development. So, to set the scene for our wide-ranging voyage of discovery over the next few issues, we’ll investigate the early days of the x86 architecture.
This Compaq Deskpro 386 was the first PC to utilise the Intel 80386 32-bit processor.
CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons, Tecnoxarxa, CC0 1.0
1991 COMPUTING LANDSCAPE
To set the scene of what 386based Linux had to compete with when it first came to light in 1991, let’s take a look at the computing landscape of the early 1990s. Or, to be more accurate, let’s delve into what computer enthusiasts were using. We’ll see something of the professional side of 1990s computing later in the series, but here we’re concentrating on machines that were designed specifically as home computers. Of course, 386-based PCs were used by some well-heeled enthusiasts, but here we’re considering those machines that aren’t discussed in the main part of this article.
By the early ’90s, the mass market home computer revolution – Sinclair ZX80, BBC Micro and all – was a decade old. And things had changed a lot in those 10 years. Many of the computers that brought computing to the home had fallen by the wayside. And while some hobbyists had turned their attention to the PC, other computers came into being to fill the gap in the home computer market. The ’80s might have been the era of 8-bit home computers, but as the ’90s arrived, home computers had already started their transition to 16 bits and beyond. One of the most popular was the Commodore Amiga range, which included the Amiga 500 that used the 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 processor, and the fully 32-bit Amiga 3000. But as a computer that can trace its ancestry back to one of the ’80s greats, the BBC Micro, we also have to mention the Acorn Archimedes. Its biggest legacy is surely the ARM processor that was designed for it. Needless to say, we’ll be seeing more of this family of chips later in the series.