In the days when AT&T's Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were
designing UNIXTM, they wanted to create a way for
people to interact with their new system.
Operating systems at that time came with command interpreters, which
could take commands from the user and interpret them so the machine
could use them.
But Ritchie and Thompson wanted something more, something that
offered better features than the command interpreters available at that
time. This lead to the development of the Bourne shell (known simply as
sh), created by S.R. Bourne. Since the creation of
the Bourne shell, other shells have been developed, such as the C shell
(csh) and the Korn shell (ksh).
When the Free Software Foundation sought a royalty-free shell,
developers began to work on the language behind the Bourne shell as well
as some of the popular features from other shells available at the time.
The result was the Bourne Again Shell, or
bash. Although your system came with several
different shells, bash is the default shell for
Red Hat Linux. You can learn more about bash by reading the
bash man page (type man bash at a
shell prompt).
