Slashdot Mirror
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."
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID:
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
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 (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. :-(.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have
Related - post from Lars Wirzenius http://liw.fi/linux20/
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.
Well, Linux has been going in and out of style, but it's still guaranteed to raise a smile.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...to redirect the news focus AWAY from this historical anniversary.
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.
"Would it have taken off in the same manner if it had actually been called Freax? Names do matter."
I think you'll find the correct name is GNU/Freax (a terrific platform for GIMP, git and Iceweasel!).
Just a few months later, I was really wanting a Unixy like OS for my 16 MHz 386 PC with a whopping 2.5 Mb of RAM and 40MB hard disc. In the cold wet January of 1992, I think it was Linux (kernel 0.12, or perhaps 0.11) which we started with.
Two of us made a few of the PCs in the university's PC lab dual boot Linux and DOS. In those days there were no distros, you had a root disc and boot disc, and had to use cp -r to copy the root disc to the hard disc, then use a hex editor to change the kernel binary to use the hard disc for the root filesystem instead of the floppy.
I started learning C on this system. All the stuff I needed to learn C on a partition of a 40MB IDE disc. (Later I had a 486 with an 80MB IDE disc, partitioned 50/50 DOS and Linux, on the Linux side I had the X Window System, a C compiler and all the development libraries and enough space to write programs in C for X11. By then there was an early TCP stack too, so a friend and I networked our computers and shared files with NFS).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I don't think anyone will be as influential in the computer world. It was a much smaller community back then and it was easier to stand out. That's not to say there won't be people who do things that are as meaningful but they will now be one of dozens of projects.
If a person is going to be that sort of stand out today, he will have to be in another field - perhaps nanotechnology or bio-engineering - where the foundations are still being laid.
the big influencers in high tech will come from somewhere where they don't have technology and live in primitive third world conditions?
You do know there's this magical number, "2," that sits between 1 and 3 right?
"Second world" traditionally means Warsaw Pact countries like former Soviet Russia, where 1 and 3 sit on YOU.
No, that is RMS being bitter.
Had he been willing to see the opportunity he would have adopted the Linux kernel (Linus wasn't willing to make Linux an official GNU project with copyright assignment) as an interium solution and completed GNU. Had the FSF got its act together and put out a complete bootable distribution of Linux + GNU + X with their official seal of approval it would almost certainly become (had it not sucked, been updated, etc) the primary distribution and we wouldn't have had most of the others because they wouldn't have had a reason to exist. And if they ever finished HURD they could have, like Debian is doing now, began offering a distro with that as the kernel and the users would have decided which they liked.
A GNU with only FSF copyrighted code was and is never going to happen (no attempt is even being made at things like X for example) so what was the objection to putting Linux in to get to a complete bootable GNU system? Once Linus adopted GPL2 as the license all the parts were in place to produce GNU 1.0 but they waited for HURD. Their fault.
Democrat delenda est
My favourite early Linux quote is v0.02 (I think) (still 1991) "Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)", and little later "Wait for Hurd if you want something real.".