'Just a hobby, won't be big': Linus Torvalds introduced Linux 35 years ago - and almost called it Freax
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ZDNET's key takeaways
- At the start, Torvalds had no clue how big Linux would become.
- Some early developers still work on Linux today.
- Torvalds has no intention of ever stopping work on Linux.
In 1991, Unix was an important but secondary x86 operating system. That year, on Aug. 25, a Finnish graduate student named Linus Benedict Torvalds announced on the Usenet group comp.os.minix that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
No one knew it, not even Torvalds, but the technology world was about to change forever.
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Thirty-five years later, Linux rules IT. Almost all major websites, including Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, run on Linux. The same is true of the cloud. Even on Microsoft's Azure, Linux is the most popular operating system. As for supercomputers, the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux. Thanks to Android, Linux is also the most popular end-user operating system.
Not bad for a hobby operating system.
Four birthdays
Torvalds and I have talked about Linux and its history, and he's both pleased and bemused by Linux's rise. But as for the operating system's birthday, Torvalds said, you can argue it has four birthdays:
"The first newsgroup post is more public (August 25), and you can find it with headers giving date and time and everything. In contrast, I don't think the 0.01 release was ever announced in any public setting (only in private to a few people who had shown interest, and I don't think any of those emails survive). These days the way to find the 0.01 date (September 17) is to go and look at the dates of the files in the tar-file that still remains.
"So, both of them work for me. Or either.
"And, by the way, some people will argue for yet other days. For example, the earliest public semi-mention of Linux was July 3: that was the first time I asked for some POSIX docs publicly on the Minix newsgroup and mentioned I was working on a project (but didn't name it). And at the other end, October 5 was the first time I actually publicly announced a Linux version: "version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already)."
In those early days, Torvalds was encouraged by his professors at the University of Helsinki.
"Most of the time, Linux was very much under the radar -- it's not like it was ever a university project and I didn't want it to be -- but Helsinki University (at least the CS department) was very open to unofficial 'extra-curricular' activities. I don't think Linux was necessarily all that special in that way either. It just happened to grow to be something big. I never got the feeling that you had to work a special way, or that only the sanctioned official university projects were given resources. For example, the CS department ended up trying out (and then using fairly widely) Linux machines running X as thin clients, but also a DEC Alpha machine running Linux in the server room. Sure, Linux use in universities wasn't exactly unusual, but I think they were particularly open to it because it was a local, cool project."
At the time, Torvalds thought he'd call Linux "Freax," a mashup of "free," "freak," and "x" to evoke a Unix‑like system. When he uploaded the code to the FUNET FTP server, though, his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the first servers, really disliked "Freax," so he named the project directory "Linux" instead, and that name stuck.
Trying out this new thing
The first person to "install" this wet-behind-the-ears operating system was his buddy, Lars Wirzenius.
Wirzenius later recalled: "People were interested in trying out this new thing, so Linus needed to provide an installation method and instructions. Since he only had one PC, he came to visit to install it on mine. Since his computer had been used to develop Linux, which had simply grown on top of his Minix installation, it had never actually been installed before. Thus, mine was the first PC where Linux was ever installed. While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping while Linus does the hard work."
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Once 0.02 was available, a small but enthusiastic group of volunteers began downloading, testing, tweaking, and returning patches to Torvalds via email and Usenet. So, from the start, Linux became a collaborative project. The turning point was that Torvalds not only accepted outside changes but actively encouraged them, treating his kernel as a commons that others could extend.
It didn't take long for Torvalds to realize his little project wouldn't stay little for long. By the end of 1991, Linux was gaining more attention than GNU Hurd or Minix (Andrew Tanenbaum's ground-breaking free software educational Unix operating system). Torvalds explained:
"I started doing some paging to disk around Christmas 1991, and at that point, Linux was doing things that Minix didn't. It was one of the reasons why the release numbering jumped from 0.03 (perhaps November 1991) to 0.12 (January 1992).
"That wasn't exactly radical (people had made Minix extensions that did paging etc), but it was a sign that Linux was starting to do things that I wasn't used to Minix doing.
"By summer 1992, we had X running and Linux just looked like a completely different animal from the Minix I had grown used to (but I don't even know what Minix did afterward).
"The rest happened pretty gradually and never really hit me as being as exceptional as the early 1992 realization that there were actually people I didn't know who were using and tinkering with Linux."
A lot smaller back then
One of the first contributors, and still a Linux maintainer today, was Theodore "Ted" Ts'o. He created the first Linux mirror in North America. Ts'o told me: "I started playing with Linux sometime in September 1991. At the time, there was only a 64Kbps link between Finland and the US. Fortunately, Linux sources were a lot smaller back then -- the sources for Linux 0.11 were only 93K. Still, we had to share this European interconnect with everyone else using the internet at the time, and so download times could suffer."
He continued, "Since MIT was one of the founding members of the New England Academic and Research network (NEARnet), it had multiple princely 10 megabit microwave links to Harvard, Boston University, and to BBN, where it connected to the rest of the internet. (Most universities at the time had only 1.5 megabit T1 lines.) So I set up an FTP server using my VAXstation 3100 on my desk, which was called tsx-11.mit.edu."
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That's when I joined the party. I'd been using Unix for over a decade. I'd seen the Usenet posts, and thought I'd give it a try. But I could only try it after Ts'o put up his FTP server. You may have noticed that I rather like Linux.
Torvalds' good friend Dirk Hohndel, head of Ericsson Software Technology, told me recently: "The first presentations about Linux (and XFree86) at a conference happened in the fall of 1993 at NLUUG in Ede, Netherlands. The conference had two tracks. The room for Linus' talk was packed, a real fire hazard with people sitting on the stairs, etc. Just before Linus was to start, the door opened again, and a few more people came in. One of the organizers told them that the room was too full and they should go next door to the other track. One of the people coming in said, 'Well, I'm the other presenter, and these are the people that were in my audience, but we all would rather hear Linus' talk.'"
No idea where it could all lead
The term for what was happening with Linux hadn't been invented yet. Today, we call it open source.
This concept of developers working together on jointly held and managed code became the single most important software development method in history. While Linux would not have existed without Linus, influential early Linux developers such as Theodore Ts'o, James Bottomley, Gerald Pfeifer, and Greg Kroah-Hartman were also vital to its growth.
Of course, they had no idea where it would all lead.
As Torvalds told me, "The '91 model year Linus really didn't think 30 years ahead, and if he had, he wouldn't have thought that the experiment he was working on would be around at all. Other projects seemed much more serious."
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Looking back, Torvalds said he usually thinks, "some of the early stuff that really probably isn't all that big a deal anymore, but that felt big to me just because they were surprising and/or important at the time."
For example, "personally, 0.03 was a big step, which is when Linux became self-hosting for the first time, I think. And 0.12 was when it suddenly became almost useful to some people, and you could actually do some limited real work with it (and when the aforementioned 'Hey, people I don't know are using it' happened). Admittedly, you had to be pretty hardcore to play around with it, but there are still active kernel developers around from that timeframe."
Looking at the bigger picture, Torvalds has said the period in early 1992, when Linux switched to the GNU Public License version 2 (GPLv2), was especially important. He recalled: "It wasn't the original license, but I'm convinced it's a big part of why Linux became so widespread. Not everybody loves the GPL, and I've had my own issues with the FSF [Free Software Foundation], but I do think the GPLv2 has been a huge deal, and people shouldn't dismiss the licensing issues."
He also said:
"I think the companies getting involved has been hugely important -- and that may sound so obvious as to be trite and stupid, but some corners of the open-source community have been fairly negative to any commercial involvement."
But the commercial interest in Linux has been important:
"It's a cultural thing, and while it started out small (with various commercial Linux distributions starting out already in 92), it was a fairly continual thing. There were a few big notable events along the way: IBM coming on board, Oracle, the Red Hat IPO, etc, but I think the underlying big thing really is that co-existence between the open-source kernel people and a lot of very different companies. I think that's fairly unusual and unique.
"There have been the purely technical ones. That's been so constant that it's hard to point to anything really particular. I think the first ports to other architectures were perhaps conceptually one of the biggest steps (and particularly the Linux/alpha port) because it changed the whole target landscape.
"Of course, the version control systems (VCS) BitKeeper, and then obviously Git, were both big steps, simply because of how they changed my ability to manage the source code. A few corners of the kernel tree had tried CVS [Concurrent Versions System], but it really wasn't a useful tool for something that distributed. So BK and Git didn't change the kernel directly, but made some of the progress possible indirectly."
Indeed, Torvalds has told me that it was only after he created Git that he felt like a successful programmer. After that, he no longer needed to fear that Linux was a one-off.
Not retiring anytime soon
Five years ago, Torvalds told me he saw himself keeping on: "I'm 51 years young, I enjoy what I'm doing. What would I do if I didn't do Linux? Puttering around in the garden? Not bloody likely. You could ask me again in a couple of years when the kids are all flown (one done, one doing graduate studies, one still undergrad). Not that I expect that gardening will look any more likely then either, but you can ask."
Today, Torvalds still doesn't see himself retiring to the garden anytime soon, or ever. True, these days he no longer thinks of himself as a programmer; he's mostly a maintainer. AI, which in 1991 was a niche computer science topic, has become 2026's hottest tech. That's fine by Torvalds, who has also embraced AI, especially for finding bugs in Linux.
Where do we go from here? Stay tuned. Recently, the one area where Linux hasn't displaced all its former rivals, the desktop, is finally moving to Linux. So, who knows? By 2031, when Linux turns 40, maybe Linux will be the top desktop operating system.