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'Just a hobby, won't be big': Linus Torvalds introduced Linux 35 years ago - and almost called it Freax
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In 1991, Unix was an important but secondary x86 operating system. That year, on Aug. 25, a Finnish graduate student named Linus Benedict Torvalds announced on the Usenet group comp.os.minix that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
No one knew it, not even Torvalds, but the technology world was about to change forever.
Also: Linux's remarkable journey from one dev's hobby to 40 million lines of code - and counting
Thirty-five years later, Linux rules IT. Almost all major websites, including Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, run on Linux. The same is true of the cloud. Even on Microsoft's Azure, Linux is the most popular operating system. As for supercomputers, the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux. Thanks to Android, Linux is also the most popular end-user operating system.
Torvalds and I have talked about Linux and its history, and he's both pleased and bemused by Linux's rise. But as for the operating system's birthday, Torvalds said, you can argue it has four birthdays:
"The first newsgroup post is more public (August 25), and you can find it with headers giving date and time and everything. In contrast, I don't think the 0.01 release was ever announced in any public setting (only in private to a few people who had shown interest, and I don't think any of those emails survive). These days the way to find the 0.01 date (September 17) is to go and look at the dates of the files in the tar-file that still remains.
"And, by the way, some people will argue for yet other days. For example, the earliest public semi-mention of Linux was July 3: that was the first time I asked for some POSIX docs publicly on the Minix newsgroup and mentioned I was working on a project (but didn't name it). And at the other end, October 5 was the first time I actually publicly announced a Linux version: "version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already)."
In those early days, Torvalds was encouraged by his professors at the University of Helsinki.
"Most of the time, Linux was very much under the radar -- it's not like it was ever a university project and I didn't want it to be -- but Helsinki University (at least the CS department) was very open to unofficial 'extra-curricular' activities. I don't think Linux was necessarily all that special in that way either. It just happened to grow to be something big. I never got the feeling that you had to work a special way, or that only the sanctioned official university projects were given resources. For example, the CS department ended up trying out (and then using fairly widely) Linux machines running X as thin clients, but also a DEC Alpha machine running Linux in the server room. Sure, Linux use in universities wasn't exactly unusual, but I think they were particularly open to it because it was a local, cool project."