Linux is celebrating its 20th birthday today. While pinpointing the exact day when it was created is hard, and subjective, today is the day that the world found out about Linus Torvalds' hobby project, Linux.
On 25 August, 1991, Linus took to the Minix newsgroup to announce his creation and progress.
By that time he had a pretty much working operating system, with all of the main components being ready, though he felt he was still several months away from Linux being something people would be able to actually use.
"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," he said in his now legendary
announcement.
"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)," he added.
The project didn't even start out as an operating system. Linus initially set out to create a terminal emulator, to connect to the Unix machines of the time, that worked on his computer and was OS independent.
But, as he continued to build functionality, he realized he had actually created a kernel and the basics of an OS so the project morphed from that.
As a sidenote, the operating system wasn't called Linux at the time. Linus though about that name, but believed it to be too arrogant. Instead, he settled on Freax.
However, one of his colleagues at the University of Helsinki, who handled the FTP where the code was stored, named the project Linux since he didn't like the Freax name.
Now, everyone just calls it Linux, though, strictly speaking, Linux is the name of the kernel. The basic operating system relies on a number of tools, created by the GNU foundation, so it's more accurately called GNU/Linux. Even among avid users and developers, this terminology is not always used.
Despite its modest starts, Linux has evolved into the most diverse and interesting operating system out there, powering anything from robots, routers, mobile phones and the world's fastest supercomputers.
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