Happy Birthday, Linux! An OS At 24

prisoninmate writes: It has been 24 long years since the first ever release of the Linux project on August 25, 1991, which is the core component of any GNU/Linux distribution. With this occasion we want to remind everyone that Linux is everywhere, even if you don't see it. You use Linux when you search on Google, when you use your phone, when buy metro tickets, actually the whole Internet is powered by Linux. Happy Birthday, Linux!

Comments

One exception...

[Eric Freyhart]

Except for where it is powered by Windows.

Re:One exception...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the internet is mostly powered by Cisco IOS. Some leaf nodes may run Windows or Linux.

"operating system"

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :-(.

Title is accurate: The original announcement refers to an operating system, so this is the birth of the linux operating system.

Re:It's been 24 years

[NonUniqueNickname]

You very well might be right, but isn't that what COBOL devs said back in the day about the year 2000?

Re:Crap.

[LVSlushdat]

Sure is interesting that all of the people posting about how bad Linux is are posting AC... Wonder why? Wonder if they're just trolls.. nah, couldn't be...

Re:Crap.

[mark-t]

386BSD, the BSD for PC's from which almost all, if not all modern PC variants of BSD are descended from, first appeared in spring of 1992, after Linux had already been around for some number of months, albeit still in a very alpha state. Even though 386BSD was vastly technically superior to Linux when it first came out, at the time, Linux had simply far too many minor features that made it more amenable to the prevalent existing PC's at the time. Linux had floating point emulation, where BSD required a coprocessor (which at the time was still considered relatively luxurious), and Linux could co-exist with DOS on a hard disk with multiple partitions, while BSD initially had no such capability. By the time BSD had added these features, Linux had largely caught up with it in terms of being far less alpha-state.

Linux isn't popular because it is faddish, Linux is popular because back in the beginning, it did what people actually needed it to do, while the alternatives did not... and by the time others could also do so, Linux simply had too much of a head start. Linux maintained the lead ever since.

But does having a head start make something a fad?