[ Thanks to Linux User &
Developer magazine for this link. ]
“The year was 2001, the tech world was reeling from the
effects of the ongoing dot-com bust, Microsoft had recently been
deemed a monopoly under US antitrust law, and Intel had just
introduced the Pentium 4 to the market. In the midst of the various
tribulations of the time came the release of Linux kernel 2.4 on 4
January 2001.“It contained such revolutionary (for the time) features as
support for USB, and ISA ‘Plug and Play’ – doing away with
the need to configure hardware jumpers or run the special isapnp
commands to make various adaptor cards work. Many other features we
take for granted today soon followed, including support for logical
volumes (LVM) from Sistina (later acquired by Red Hat), software
RAID and the ext3 file system.“Kernel 2.4 was revolutionary because it was the first kernel
release that was truly embraced by enterprise users for use in
their operations. Linux had had support for SMP (symmetric
multiprocessing – another term for multiple CPUs) since 2.0,
but the improvements in 2.4 driven by the newly involved big
players (such as IBM)…”