[ Thanks to Derek
Barber for this link. ]
“In 1983 the GNU project was started by Richard Stallman, who
was working in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab at the time. The
project was very ambitious… By 1990 almost all of the pieces were
completed, all except for the most important piece, the
kernel…”
“Work then began upon a kernel for the GNU system, the name
given to this kernel was the Hurd. The actual meaning of Hurd is
quite interesting, it is a mutually recursive acronym; Hurd stands
for “Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons”, and then the Hird part of
Hurd stands for “Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth.”
“The Hurd is based upon a microkernel design and is made up of a
number of servers that run as processes on top of a microkernel.
“