Celebrating 20 Years of Linux

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Yesterday is a very special day for Linux. 20 years ago, on this very day Linus Torvalds sat down at his computer to share word of his ‘hobby’ operating system to users of Minix – a UNIX Operating System – on the UseNet newsgroup ‘comp.os.minix‘.

 

On August 25th, 1991, Linus Torvalds wrote:

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 portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

—Linus Torvalds

 

Happy 20th birthday Linux


1 Comment
  1. Adi says

    The greatest things started on Usenet. Who would have thought his hobby would become so influential..

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