The author opens the book by explaining the niche Microsoft had filled by the early 1990's and how Linux fits in.
Windows 3.0 launched in May 1990; it its first year 4 million copies were sold. In 1994 Microsoft introduced Visual Basic. Visual Basic empowered people to build Windows applications without forcing them to know the ins and outs of computers as most lower level languages would.
The release of Windows 3.1 followed the release of Windows 3.0 and it cemented Microsoft's dominance in the desktop market. At this time, companies were crossing over from DOS to Windows. Microsoft used this to their advantage by building Office packages like Word and Excel. Being ready with the release of Windows, this allowed Microsoft to challenge the dominance of other's in this market; one must understand the ethical dilemma this raised as Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems and knew why and when to create such products.
In 1998, Dave Cutler, the author of VMS (an operating system, for Digital Equipment Corporation), was chosen to design a Windows NT for Microsoft. In 1991, it was near completion. Windows NT was designed for back office use (used as servers), while Windows 3.1 was designed for front office use (use by secretaries, managers, etc).
Since Unix edged out VMS for the leading enterprise software position, Windows NT was invented to edge out Unix. Windows NT appeared up to the task as the new enterprise software solution because of the high fragmentation of Unix.
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee a British physicist at CERN, released a hyper text system called the World Wide Web, which ran across the Internet.
In 1991, Sun Microsystems was developing Java, a highly portable programming language.
Despite the future threats Java and the World Wide Web posed to Microsoft, the greater of these may prove to be, what seemed the least likely, Linux. Linux is a Unix like operating system that was started in 1991 by a Linus Torvalds; a second year computer science student at Helsinki Finland.
Linus was born on barns dag, December 28, 1969 and was named after Linus Pauling, a U.S. Nobel prize winning scientist.
Linus' involvement in computer started at a young age and was encouraged by his grandfather. Linus first computer was a Vic-20. He developed an early interest in the low level aspects of programming. One must be aware of the chip architecture to program using a low level language, and Linus was very aware of the merits of a chip.
Linus, although born in Finland, was raised speaking Swedish. Because of this, he tended to befriend other Swedish speaking computer science students. Among these, Lars Wirzenius remained a close personal friend throughout the development of Linux.