History Of The Slackware Operating System
In 1991, a Finnish computer science student, Linus Benedict Torvalds created a version of Unix intended for personal computers. It became known as Linux, and was distributed open source. Because of this, many other programmers took Linux and put their own twist on it. These are commonly called Linux ‘distributions’.
One of the most popular of the early distributions was SLS (Softlanding Linux System). In 1993, Patrick Volkerding was asked to install SLS in his university’s computer lab. He started to make minor modifications to make this easier and began to create his own distribution. He never intended to make it public, and jokingly referred to it as ‘Slackware’, a reference to the Church of the Subgenius.
However, he was rapidly persuaded to make his modifications available on an FTP server. A disk distribution rapidly followed, growing to 73 floppy disks by 1994 and switching to CD in 1995. By this point it was the best known and most popular distribution amongst serious users and computer professionals. It ran print, file and web services in many back rooms.
In the late nineties, though, commercial distributions such as Red Hat and Mandrake took over, with Slackware losing its dominance. Over time, the commercial distributions added such niceties as graphical installers and an operating system that booted, by default, into a graphical mode. Slackware remained a minimalist distribution with few customization options. The Slackware distribution assumes that the user knows what he or she is doing. Its simplicity, although a down side for inexperienced users, is helpful for package and software maintainers.
Slackware remains in development, with the current version, as of April 2011, being 2.6.37.6. It is the oldest actively maintained distribution and is still maintained and updated by Volkerding himself. Although used by few commercial and personal users, it retains a dedicated following amongst serious professionals.