Anniversary Worth Remembering: August 25, 1991, That Kid from Helsinki

Submitted by threew on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 11:17am.
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Wired commemorating the 18th anniversary of the first public announcement of what was to become Linux.

"1991: Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old university student from Finland, writes a post to a user group asking for feedback on a little project he’s working on. He’s built a simple kernel for a Unix-like operating system that runs on an Intel 386 processor, and he wants to develop it further. The kernel eventually becomes Linux, which is released in 1994 and distributed over the internet for free."

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It's a great story, and a
Submitted by matt on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 8:35pm.

It's a great story, and a milestone (arguably the start) of the open-source movement.

I'll agree that it was a
Submitted by jdunham on Mon, 08/31/2009 - 10:16pm.

I'll agree that it was a milestone, and probably the most significant of many in the formative years of open source. I'll argue with calling it "the start". FreeBSD was getting off the ground during those same years, and it came from a much longer history and tradition at Berkeley and elsewhere.

I made the transition from Xenix to FreeBSD for my personal machines here at home around the time Linux was just coming together, and at that time BSD UNIX was far more robust and well formed than Linux. I would argue that Eric Smith's MiNT was also ahead of Linux at one point, but its licensing scheme wasn't as open as Linux and FreeBSD and Eric seemed to lose interest once he graduated and took a real job. The success of Linux makes it look today like it was always the only One True Open-Source OS, but there was a time when that wasn't obvious at all.

Somewhere around here I bet I still have a pre-Linux copy of Minix, since I never throw anything away.

--
Jerry Dunham
Pack rat

OK, I agree with that, as my
Submitted by matt on Tue, 09/01/2009 - 12:16am.

OK, I agree with that, as my statement wasn't particularly qualified. Looking back, I think of Linus's Usenet post as a milestone event that eventually propelled open-source to the mainstream...but you're right: at the time, it was just one in the mix of many.

My Linux start was with Slackware & 1.3.19 kernel in the early 90's...back when X had to be compiled and monitor config files had to be tuned correctly (else your monitor gets burned out). Those were the days.