Happy birthday, Linux
On this day in 1991, an unassuming hacker from Finland called Linus Torvalds reached out to fellow enthusiasts online to get ideas for features for his new hobby operating system.
The Internet was in its infancy, the World Wide Web had only just been launched and barely anyone was using it, and there certainly wasn’t any Facebook or Twitter.
Torvalds posted a message to a proto-social network called Usenet, short for “User’s Network”.
Usenet was developed as a worldwide distributed discussion system where participants could post messages (or articles) to one or more topic categories called newsgroups.
In a message with the subject “What would you like to see most in minix?” and the topic summary “small poll for my new operating system”, Torvalds posted the following at 20:57:08 GMT:
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 ([email protected]) 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 :-(.
Google Groups maintains an archive of Usenet newsgroups, including the original text of this message.
Although Torvalds had started developing what would become Linux much earlier, and even asked some questions about what he was working on in the same newsgroup, this was the first time he publicly declared that he was working on an operating system.
For this reason, 25 August is widely considered Linux’s birthday.
Torvalds had initially named his project Freax, a portmanteau of “free”, “freak”, and “x” (as a reference to Unix).
He admitted that he had considered “Linux” and even called the project privately. However, he dismissed the idea of calling it “Linux” in public as too egotistical.
However, Ari Lemmke, a volunteer server administrator at the Helsinki University of Technology, didn’t like “Freax”.
Lemmke was one of the admins who looked after the File Transfer Protocol server Torvalds used to distribute the original code.
Without consultation, he decided to use “Linux” for the project’s name on the server.
Torvalds remembers the story as follows in his autobiography Just for fun: the story of an accidental revolutionary:
[Lemmke] hated the name Freax. He preferred the other working name I was using Linux and named my posting: pub/OS/Linux. I admit that I didn’t put up much of a fight. But it was his doing. So I can honestly say I wasn’t egotistical, or half-honestly say I wasn’t egotistical. But I thought, okay, that’s a good name, and I can always blame somebody else for it, which I’m doing now.
After some additional development and beta testing, Torvalds posted the first version of Linux (version 0.01) to the FTP server on 17 September 1991.
Some might call that Linux’s birthday, but they would be wrong. It is clearly 25 August.
Linus Torvalds receiving 2018 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award from ICCE 2018 Conference Chair Saraju P. Mohanty and IEEE President James A. Jefferies at ICCE 2018 on 12 January 2018 in Las Vegas. Photo: Notsoimp2012/Wikimedia
Internet Relay Chat
Another early Finnish-developed technology with a birthday in August is Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Created by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988, IRC was the first Internet chat network, predating the Web by several years.
In his recollection of events, Oikarinen said, “the exact date is unknown, at the end of the month anyways.”
Now read: Linux beats MacOS in Steam players — and the reason is clear
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