of ext

MINIX filesystem

Before there was ext, there was the MINIX filesystem. If you're not up on your Linux history, MINIX was a very small Unix-like operating system for IBM PC/AT microcomputers. Andrew Tannenbaum developed it for teaching purposes and released its source code (in print form!) in 1987.

Although you could peruse MINIX's source, it was not actually free and open source software (FOSS). The publishers of Tannebaum's book required a $69 license fee to operate MINIX, which was included in the cost of the book. Still, this was incredibly inexpensive for the time, and MINIX adoption took off rapidly, soon exceeding Tannenbaum's original intent of using it simply to teach the coding of operating systems. By and throughout the 1990s, you could find MINIX installations thriving in universitiesgigabytes and filesystem sizes in the terabytes, placing it firmly in the big leagues for the 1990s. It was quickly and widely adopted, both in the Linux kernel and eventually in MINIX, as well as by third-party modules making it available for MacOS and Windows.

There were still problems to solve, though: ext2 filesystems, like most filesystems of the 1990s, were prone to catastrophic corruption if the system crashed or lost power while data was being written to disk. They also suffered from significant performance losses due to fragmentation (the storage of a single file in multiple places, physically scattered around a rotating disk) as time went on.

Despite these problems, ext2 is still used in some isolated cases today—most commonly, as a format for portable USB thumb drives.

ext3

In 1998,