20 years ago today, Linus Torvalds introduced Linux to the world. Torvalds was three years into a computer science degree at the University of Helsinki, Finland, when he bought an Intel 80386-based PC. He famously spent a month playing Prince of Persia while waiting for his copy of Minix to arrive — and while Minix was free for educational use, its license did not allow it to be modified and it was only 16-bit operating system, which didn’t set well with the 32-bit 386 processor.
It would be a few long months before Linux actually emerged, however. Linux started life as a terminal emulator, which Torvalds used to access his university’s Unix system. It was built under Minix using the GNU C Compiler(GCC), which Stallman & Co. had only released a few years prior. Before he knew it, though, he had written a full-blown operating system kernel for his 80386 computer, and thus he drafted the following email to the Minix mailing list on August 25 1991:
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)…
By this point he had already ported Bash and GCC to his new operating system, and he was already taking feature requests — but the fledgling OS didn’t even have a name. Linus wanted to call it Freax — a portmanteau of freak, free, and the Unix “x” moniker — but later, when the codebase was moved to a FUNET FTP server, Linus’ coworker (and the FTP admin) Ari Lemmke named the directory “linux” because he didn’t like the name Freax.
The rest, as they say, is history. Linus originally released the kernel under his own, non-commercial license, but by December 1992 it was released under the full GNU GPL license and the first Linux distributions (Debian, Slackware, and others) started to appear. Far from being “just a hobby”, and surely powered by the massive success of 386, 486, and the seemingly-eternal support of the x86 instruction set, Linux soon blossomed into the first truly successful open source project.
In 1996, the project picked up a mascot — Tux (pictured above) — and gained the ability to perform multi-processor symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), a feature that instantly made Linux a viable option for enterprises and supercomputers, and companies like IBM and Oracle soon started to show their support. By the turn of the 21st century Linux had grown into a vast, unstoppable behemoth, and combined with Apache it would become a key component of the Dot Com Boom — and through VA Linux’s massive IPO, part of the bursting Dot Com Bubble.
Today, Linux dominates the supercomputing world, powers somewhere between 50 and 80% of all web servers, and with Ubuntu’s recent popularity it has even managed to secure up to 2 or 3% of the desktop market. It’s easy to forget, but Linux is also the kernel beneath Android, and it also powers most wireless routers and many DVD players.
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