Software5.10.2024

33 years of Linux

On 5 October 1991, a young Finnish student named Linus Torvalds publicly released the first few lines of code for a small operating system project he had wanted to call “Freax” — a portmanteau of free, freak, and UNIX.

The 21-year-old Torvalds had begun hacking on the project several months earlier but only revealed that he was working on a “hobby” operating system in a Usenet post on 25 August 1991.

Usenet is a distributed discussion system that predates the World Wide Web and was a precursor to modern web forums.

“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,” Torvalds wrote.

On 17 September, Torvalds privately released very early code to a handful of people who had expressed interest in his project. He dubbed it version 0.01.

He said he probably wasn’t very proud of it, so he didn’t make it public.

A few weeks later, he released the version 0.02 code. It was not yet a standalone system, extremely rudimentary, and difficult to set up.

However, Torvalds said some people did try it out, and he was comfortable enough to release it.

The original Usenet post announcing this version is archived on Google Groups.

In the time between the original August announcement and the October code drop, a volunteer administrator for the university file transfer protocol server they used wrecked Torvalds’ plans to name the project Freax.

Torvalds later admitted he had considered the name “Linux” but dismissed it as an option because it was too egotistical.

However, Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology had no such qualms.

Lemmke didn’t think Freax was a good name, so he named the project Linux on the server without consulting Torvalds.

Torvalds ultimately assented to the change.

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

In June 1992, Linux had come a long way, and Torvalds wrote a Usenet post reflecting on its first year of development.

Torvalds recalled that version 0.02 had several nasty bugs, no floppy disk driver, and wasn’t particularly useful yet.

However, version 0.03 was released shortly after that, with Torvalds saying they had maintained a 2–3 week release schedule even back then.

This version was already fairly usable, and the next version skipped ahead to 0.10 as things started to work reasonably well.

The rest is history.

Today, Linux powers most of the world’s supercomputers, controls much of the Internet server market, and dominates in smartphones thanks to Android.

Linux might have lost the desktop operating system battle to Windows and MacOS, but it is winning the overall war.

In a 2021 interview with iTWire about Linux’s 30th anniversary, Torvalds said he recognised three important “birthdays” for the kernel.

“I actually have three anniversaries, and they are all equally valid in my mind,” he said.

The first was on 25 August, when he first publicly announced the project. The second was 17 September, when he privately sent out version 0.01.

5 October was the last significant anniversary date for Linux — the day he first released the code publicly.

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