26 Aug

Happy 24th birthday, Linux!

Can you believe Linux is celebrating 24 years already? It was on this day, August 25, back in 1991 when a young Linus Torvalds made his now-legendary announcement on the comp.os.minix newsgroup:

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

PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

Quite an understated beginning if I ever heard one!

There’s some debate in the Linux community as to whether we should be celebrating Linux’s birthday today or on October 5 when the first public release was made, but Linus says he is O.K. with you celebrating either one, or both! So as we say happy birthday, let’s take a quick look back at the years that have passed and how far we have come.

Via OpenSource.