[短文翻译]Linux简史（一）
原文： History of Linux (Copy Right of the Original Writer of the article @ University of Lllinois at Urbana-Champaign, Please contact me if you think it is not appropriate to be displayed here.)
a. In The Beginning A：开天辟地
It was 1991, and the ruthless agonies of the cold war were gradually coming to an end. There was an air of peace and tranquility that prevailed in the horizon. In the field of computing, a great future seemed to be in the offing, as powerful hardware pushed the limits of the computers beyond what anyone expected.
时光回溯到1991年，正当冷战之无情的痛苦渐渐消失的时候，地平线上有一股宁静的暖流正在冉冉升起。 在计算机领域，此时也正是万象更新的时候，强大的硬件使得计算机的性能得到了令人难以置信的飞跃。
But still, something was missing.
And it was the none other than the Operating Systems, where a great void seemed to have appeared.
不过，总还是缺点儿什么。
人们似乎忽略了：操作系统 （忽略本版的人们，真该死）
For one thing, DOS was still reigning supreme in its vast empire of personal computers. Bought by Bill Gates from a Seattle hacker for $50,000, the bare bones operating system had sneaked into every corner of the world by virtue of a clever marketing strategy. PC users had no other choice. Apple Macs were better, but with astronomical prices that nobody could afford, they remained a horizon away from the eager millions.
一方面，DOS依然是个人电脑王国的至尊（supreme,必胜客的超级至尊，就叫super supreme). 由比尔盖兹以5万美金从西雅图的一位黑客手上买断的（知道为啥微软系统漏洞多了吧？）这个没血没肉的操作系统，凭借着聪明的营销手段而充斥世界的每个角落。 个人电脑用户几乎没有其他选择。苹果的麦金塔要好些，不过其价格却让人无法接受，也因此，它依然没有进入亿万渴望（使用电脑的人们）的视线。
The other dedicated camp of computing was the Unixworld. But Unix itself was far more expensive. In quest of big money, the Unix vendors priced it high enough to ensure small PC users stayed away from it. The source code of Unix, once taught in universities courtesy of Bell Labs, was now cautiously guarded and not published publicly. To add to the frustration of PC users worldwide, the big players in the software market failed to provide an efficient solution to this problem.
而另一部分热衷于编程事业的人们来自于unix世界。 不过unix本身实在过于天价。 为了谋求暴利，unix分销商们将其价格哄抬的高的足以将普通的个人电脑用户拒之门外。 Unix的源代码，曾今是经由贝尔实验室允许，在大学课堂上向学生们讲授的。 不过如今，也已经被小心的保护起来，不再公开发行。 让全世界个人电脑用户更加沮丧的是，软件市场的巨臂们，也都无法对这样的情况给出有力的解决方案。
A solution seemed to appear in form of MINIX. It was written from scratch by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a US-born Dutch professor who wanted to teach his students the inner workings of a real operating system. It was designed to run on the Intel 8086 microprocessors that had flooded the world market.
MINIX的出现似乎让人看到希望。它是由一位希望在课堂上教授操作系统内部运作的美籍荷兰裔教授，安德鲁.S.Tanebaum从零写起的。该系统是基于8086这个当时可以在世界上各个角落找到的因特尔微处理器而编写的。
As an operating system, MINIX was not a superb one. But it had the advantage that the source code was available. Anyone who happened to get the book 'Operating Systems: Design and Implementation' by Tanenbaum could get hold of the 12,000 lines of code, written in C and assembly language. For the first time, an aspiring programmer or hacker could read the source codes of the operating system, which to that time the software vendors had guarded vigorously. A superb author, Tanenbaum captivated the brightest minds of computer science with the elaborate and immaculately lively discussion of the art of creating a working operating system. Students of Computer Science all over the world pored over the book, reading through the codes to understand the very system that runs their computer.
作为操作系统， MINIX并不是非常优秀。 不过它的好处是：开源。 任何拥有安德鲁的著作：《操作系统：设计和编写》的人，都可以得到该系统的12000行由C语言以及汇编语言所编写的源码.第一次，有志向的程序员或者黑客可以读到操作系统的源码，而这中源码，在当时，是软件商们所藏着掖着的。 这位优秀的作者，Tanebaum，以其在电脑科学方面的杰出天才以及详细而精确的表述，为人们讲述着创造操作系统的艺术。世界各地的电脑科学的学生，都对这本书趋之若鹜，通过读（MINIX）的源代码来了解运行在他们的个人电脑上的操作系统。
And one of them was Linus Torvalds.
其中之一，便是Linus Torvalds。
