Linus' First Linux Post, 20 Years Ago Today

jrepin writes "One midsummer's night, a student at the University of Helsinki posted a query to the newsgroup comp.os.minix asking, 'What would you like to see most in minix?' The student's name was Linus Torvalds, and that Usenet post was the beginning of the Linux operating system. The date was 25 August 1991, exactly 20 years ago today. In 1991 Unix had existed for about 20 years, Apple had come out with its Mac OS in 1984, and Microsoft had been flogging Windows since 1985. Torvalds' ambitions for his 'new (free) operating system' were modest. It was to be 'just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu' for IBM PC '386(486) AT clones.' He wanted to call his OS kernel 'Freax,' but a friend who ran the FTP server that hosted the software named Torvalds' source code download directory 'linux' and the name stuck."

Re:My first post

[jhoegl]

The influence will most likely come from outside the US, EU, China, India, or other large tech countries.
Reason being? Restrictive policies that hamper innovation, such as copyright, "method patents", and large companies afraid of competition.

Very insteresting day

[cholokoy]

Maybe a hundred years from now this day will be a holiday.

Re:My first post

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you know, one of the many non-poor areas in places like South America, South Africa, Russia, Japan, Korea...

Not everyone outside of the US, EU, China and India are currently experiencing a famine, despite your US-centric view of the world as "Us and poor people reliant on Us".

Re:oh yeah...

[peter hoffman]

I was running Coherent at the time and looking for something better. I'd looked at Minix but I was looking for something open. I started playing with Linux as soon as code first became available for download and also played with 386BSD which had the lead over Linux for some time. Soon after that, the AT&T lawsuit began to cast a pall over the BSD community and Linux got TCP/IP going. Not wanting to depend on something potentially embroiled in a lawsuit (who might get sued wasn't clear then), I went with Linux as my base OS. Since then, I have continued to dabble with the various BSDs and use OpenBSD when security is a strong concern but Linux has been my first choice. It's interesting to wonder how things might have turned out if the lawsuit hadn't happened.