Thirty-five years ago today, the Linux 35th anniversary the world is now marking had the most understated of beginnings: a 21-year-old Finnish graduate student posting a brief note to a Usenet newsgroup to say he was tinkering with a hobby operating system. Nobody, including Linus Torvalds himself, had any idea what was coming.
The Post That Changed Computing
On 25 August 1991, Torvalds wrote to the comp.os.minix group that he was building ‘a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.’ He had spent the preceding months, from April through August 1991, writing the kernel from scratch, beginning with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver, according to History of Information.
Torvalds had been working with Minix, an operating system released in 1987 primarily to teach students how operating systems worked, according to XDA Developers. His ambitions, at that point, were deliberately modest. The preserved text of the original post, held at Carnegie Mellon University, shows Torvalds warned it had ‘no disk buffering,’ was ‘not portable,’ relied on 386 task switching, and would ‘probably never support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have.’
The first version, Linux 0.01, arrived on 17 September 1991. It contained 10,239 lines of code and, when uploaded to the FUNET FTP server, the archive file weighed just 113 KB, according to records of the FUNET upload. That file is still held in FUNET’s archive today.
The name nearly went a different way entirely. Torvalds wanted to call it ‘Freax,’ a mashup of ‘free,’ ‘freak,’ and ‘x’ to evoke a Unix-like system. His friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the server, disliked it and named the directory ‘Linux’ instead. The name stuck.
Linux 35th Anniversary: How a Community Was Built One Patch at a Time
Torvalds himself identifies four possible birthdays for Linux: the public Usenet post on 25 August; the 0.01 file release on 17 September; an earlier mention on 3 July, when he first asked publicly for POSIX documentation; and 5 October, when he publicly announced version 0.02. ‘So, both of them work for me,’ he told ZDNET’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols. ‘Or either.’
The first machine ever to have Linux installed was not Torvalds’ own computer; it was the PC of his friend Lars Wirzenius. Wirzenius later recalled: ‘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.’
Once version 0.02 was available, volunteers began downloading, testing, and sending patches back via email and Usenet. The turning point was that Torvalds not only accepted outside contributions but actively encouraged them, treating the kernel as shared property that others could extend.
One of the first contributors, Theodore ‘Ted’ Ts’o, set up the first North American Linux mirror in September 1991 using a VAXstation 3100 on his desk at MIT, which he named tsx-11.mit.edu. ‘At the time, there was only a 64Kbps link between Finland and the US,’ Ts’o recalled. ‘Fortunately, Linux sources were a lot smaller back then: the sources for Linux 0.11 were only 93K.’ Ts’o went on to serve as CTO of the Linux Foundation and is now at Google, where he maintains the ext4 file system in the Linux kernel and is the original author of the e2fsprogs utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems, according to his Google Research profile. He also led the MIT Kerberos V5 development team and served as the IBM architect behind real-time Linux for the US Navy.
By the end of 1991, Linux was outpacing GNU Hurd and Minix in attention. Torvalds had begun adding disk paging around Christmas 1991, a capability Minix lacked, and the version number jumped from 0.03 to 0.12. By the summer of 1992, X was running on Linux. ‘Linux just looked like a completely different animal from the Minix I had grown used to,’ Torvalds said.
Two decisions proved particularly durable. Switching to the GNU Public License version 2 in early 1992 gave Linux a legal framework Torvalds credits as ‘a big part of why Linux became so widespread.’ And the arrival of corporate partners, from IBM and Oracle to Red Hat’s eventual IPO, created a commercial ecosystem that Torvalds describes as ‘fairly unusual and unique,’ a co-existence between open-source developers and commercial interests that has rarely been replicated.
Where Linux Stands Now
Today, all 500 of the world’s fastest supercomputers run Linux. Almost every major website, including Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, runs on Linux. Through Android, Linux is also the dominant end-user operating system globally. Even on Microsoft’s Azure, Linux is the most popular operating system.
Torvalds, now in his mid-fifties, has no plans to step back. He no longer thinks of himself primarily as a programmer; he is, he says, mostly a maintainer. He has also embraced AI, particularly for finding bugs in the kernel. The one territory Linux has yet to fully conquer, the desktop, is showing new momentum, with usage figures rising.
By 2031, when Linux turns 40, whether the desktop finally falls into its column will be the question worth watching.