Android – a little lesson in history.

Android is an open sourced operating system. It was initially developed by Android, Inc., which Google backed financially and later bought in 2005, it was finally unveiled in 2007. The first smartphone which used android as its operating system was HTC Dream. It soon became very popular choice for smart phone manufactures. When it was first released it was very limited in terms of functionality but gradually matured into an extremely useful and powerful operating system.

Following are the different versions of android with their release dates.

·         Android v1.0 which was released in 23 September 2008.
       Android v1.1 which was released in 9 February 2009.
       Android v1.5 Cupcake which was released in 30 April 2009.
       Android v1.6 Donut which was released in 15 September 2009

·         Android v2.0 Eclair which was released in 26 October 2009.

·         Android v2.2 Froyo (frozen yogurt) which was released in May 20, 2010.

·         Android v2.3.3 – 2.3.7 Gingerbread which was released in February 9, 2011.

·         Android v3.2 Honeycomb (only available for tablets) which was released in February 9, 2011.

·         Android v4.0.3 – 4.0.4 Ice-cream sandwich which was released in December 16, 2011.

·         Android v4.1 - 4.3 Jellybean which was released in July 9, 2012.

·         Android v4.4 Kit Kat (latest) which was released in October 31, 2013.

Android development actually began in the early 90s, when a student of Finnish university named Linus Torvalds started coding the open sourced Linux kernel, which was available free for the rest of the world to develop upon. Because of its free open sourced nature and rebellious hacker personality, soon became the most used operating system for web-servers. Fast forward a decade and a half, and following the development of low-power consuming ARM processors, Linus became the best choice for developers at Google to build their open sourced mobile operating system on.

Android uses a file system and partitions very similar to Linux operating system. For the people who use Macintosh operating system (Apple), there isn’t much difference but for the people who use windows operating system, it’s like they have entered an alternative reality. The long story short, the android operating system has no drive letters i.e. C:\, D:\ etc. In android EXT partitions (mostly, instead of FAT) are ”mounted” onto directories. (i.e. /system,/root etc.)

It was initially developed for touch screen smartphone but now it’s been used in televisions, gaming consoles, digital cameras and other electronics. It has become the most used mobile operating system in the world. It has surpassed IOS, blackberry OS, Symbian OS and all other mobile operating systems. I wanted this lesson to be like a girl`s ”mini skirt”.

“Long enough to cover the ‘Subject’ and short enough to keep the ‘interest.’”

What do you think guys about this post don`t forget to comment below.