Linux in a matchbox
Information Week published an interesting article ranking "The Greatest Software Ever Written". The pole position in the 12-item hall of fame is held by UNIX operating system, conceived at Bell Labs as an individual pet project. During many years UNIX migrated to various flavors, with Linux being the most known and widely used today. We all know Linux is strong at server side, while most of the client machines running Windows. This is easy to understand, especially when we look at the roots of each operating system. Windows was growing on client PCs, replacing DOS being its first major goal. In the meantime it became clear Windows internals are strong and solid enough to power servers. But still the most evident part of Windows is its GUI (Graphical User Interface), something servers can live without. What is more - it is hard to imagine Windows without GUI, and this makes somehow difficult for it to invade several market niches.
One of such niches is so called embedded systems. Devices like internet routers, telephone PBX switches, WiFi access points. They run silently, being treated as a piece of hardware. But there is no pure hardware these days. Software rulez. Some time ago many of these devices used to run some proprietary pieces of code. But designers soon found out it would be much easier for them to concentrate on the real functionality they wanted to deliver, if they had some universal operating system on every platform. Every "hardware" device needs to run several tasks. Take a home router for example. It needs things like TCP/IP stack, web server (for configuration and administration), memory management, etc. At the same time it needs to be light, robust, inexpensive and does need own GUI. The truth is, most of these "hardware" devices today run Linux. As this is not a full blown distribution like Suse or Red Hat, you can find a real kernel there, accompanied by a handful of other services. Be it a TiVo receiver (or a Dreambox if you live in
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