(This article was originally published in https://steemit.com/englisch/@konstizockt/a-short-story-of-the-gnu-operating-system-or-a-short-story-of-linux.)
The story of Linux had begun even before the Finn computer science student Linus Torvalds wrote one line of code for it. In the early 80s the hacker Richard Matthew Stallman (rms) wanted to implement a free version of Unix. Therefore he started to program several tools for its development. The first software designed by the GNU Project was the famous text editor Emacs. Emacs is more than an ordinary editor, it is being treated as a whole operating system because of its powerful extension capabilities.
Around 1990 the operating system was almost complete. But one important part was still missing: the kernel. Without a kernel, the "OS" is useless. The kernel which was supposed to be the kernel for the GNU Operating System was GNU/Hurd which is based on the Mach Micro Kernel. However, this piece of software is not stable, it is still under development; not for practical usage.
When the first version of Linux was published, Linux and GNU were combined. The system was complete. That is why most Linux distributions should be officially called "GNU/Linux".
Today, most people think that Stallman was inspired by Unix. But, according to Ted Nelson, the Inventor of Hypertext, he was annoyed by the secrecy of Project Xanadu; rms wanted freedom of information (https://archive.org/details/StallmanSurpriseColor).
"Ted Nelson with model Xanadu Stand, 1983" (https://archive.org/details/TNXanaduStandModel1983)