RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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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.
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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 .
Not bad for a hobby 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.
"So, both of them work for me. Or either.
"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."
At the time, Torvalds thought he'd call Linux "Freax," a mashup of "free," "freak," and "x" to evoke a Unix‑like system. When he uploaded the code to the FUNET FTP server, though, his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the first servers, really disliked "Freax," so he named the project directory "Linux" instead, and that name stuck.
The first person to "install" this wet-behind-the-ears operating system was his buddy, Lars Wirzenius.
Wirzenius later recalled : "People were interested in trying out this new thing, so Linus needed to provide an installation method and instructions. Since he only had one PC, he came to visit to install it on mine. Since his computer had been used to develop Linux, which had simply grown on top of his Minix installation, it had never actually been installed before. Thus, mine was the first PC where Linux was ever installed. While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping while Linus does the hard work."
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Once 0.02 was available, a small but enthusiastic group of volunteers began downloading, testing, tweaking, and returning patches to Torvalds via email and Usenet. So, from the start, Linux became a collaborative project . The turning point was that Torvalds not only accepted outside changes but actively encouraged them, treating his kernel as a commons that others could extend.
It didn't take long for Torvalds to realize his little project wouldn't stay little for long. By the end of 1991, Linux was gaining more attention than GNU Hurd or Minix ( Andrew Tanenbaum 's ground-breaking free software educational Unix operating system). Torvalds explained:
"I started doing some paging to disk around Christmas 1991, and at that point, Linux was doing things that Minix didn't. It was one of the reasons why the release numbering jumped from 0.03 (perhaps November 1991) to 0.12 (January 1992).
"That wasn't exactly radical (people had made Minix extensions that did paging etc), but it was a sign that Linux was starting to do things that I wasn't used to Minix doing.
"By summer 1992, we had X running and Linux just looked like a completely different animal from the Minix I had grown used to (but I don't even know what Minix did afterward).
"The rest happened pretty gradually and never really hit me as being as exceptional as the early 1992 realization that there were actually people I didn't know who were using and tinkering with Linux."
One of the first contributors, and still a Linux maintainer today, was Theodore "Ted" Ts'o. He created the first Linux mirror in North America. Ts'o told me: "I started playing with Linux sometime in September 1991. At the time, there was only a 64Kbps link between Finland and the US. Fortunately, Linux sources were a lot smaller back then -- the sources for Linux 0.11 were only 93K. Still, we had to share this European i...
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