On August 25, 1991, the world changed. A college student in Finland by the name of Linus (LEE-noos) Torvalds announced his latest project, a new operating system for the 386 PC that uses the Minix filesystem and various GNU utilities. He named it Linux (LIN-ucks).
From there, hobbyists all over the world started downloading it and helping with the project, porting more stuff to it, writing device drivers, producing distributions, etc. etc. I won’t go into the full history, but to bring up to the present Linux is now the number one operating system for Internet web servers, and is considered much more reliable than Microsoft’s alternative offerings. The most common forms of Linux in use today are Red Hat and Debian in the USA, and SuSE in Europe. I personally prefer Debian, but suggest Red Hat to new users.
I am the founder of the Peninsula Linux User’s Group, which meets monthly at Oracle headquarters in Redwood City, CA, usually on the fourth Thursday of the month. I am also a member of the Silicon Valley Linux User’s Group, which holds meetings at Cisco’s conference center in San Jose on the first Wednesday of each month.
For the sake of nostalgia, here’s a copy of Linus’s original announcement:
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
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