The book
Da Unix a Linux (“From Unix to Linux”) is written in Italian.
If we went back 40 or 50 years, the computers we would find would not be today’s desktop PCs or the ultra-light notebooks we carry around, but machines of a size almost unimaginable for our time, as big as rooms or even entire houses.
As if the size were not problem enough, a further burden came from a fairly common practice at the time: every computer had a different operating system. All commercially available computer systems were written in code developed specifically for each of them, to perform very specialised tasks, with the result that software for one system could not run on another.
Being able to use a given computer, piece of software or system therefore did not mean being able to master the others; this was a huge difficulty not only for private users but also, and above all, for system administrators. Another critical point was that computers were extremely expensive and, on top of the initial investment, more money had to be spent explaining to users how they worked.
Things went on like this for a while, until technology was advanced enough to begin changing the state of the art, little by little. This book tells the story of that epoch-making change, a story (also) of Free Software, from Unix to Linux.
