On 25 August 1991 a student in Helsinki announced a hobby project. It now runs most of the internet, every top supercomputer, billions of phones — and a helicopter on Mars.
est. 1991 · free as in freedom
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. […]
$ dmesg --human --since 1991
Twenty-one real milestones, 1991–2026. Every entry links to a primary or authoritative source — the original mail, the release archive, the press release. The terminal follows you down.
Torvalds thought “Linux” sounded too egotistical and wanted to release it as Freax — “free” + “freak” + Unix. The ftp.funet.fi admin, Ari Lemmke, disliked the name and put the files in a directory called /linux instead. It stuck.
→ History of LinuxWhy a penguin? Torvalds was nipped by one at Canberra's National Zoo and joked about catching “penguinitis” — you stay awake at night thinking about penguins. Larry Ewing drew Tux in GIMP; a mascot was born.
→ History of TuxGit's very first README defines it as “the stupid content tracker” and notes that “git” is British slang for an unpleasant person — Torvalds joked he names all his projects after himself.
→ Git's first commitSpaceX's Falcon 9 flight computers run Linux — triple-redundant, voting on every decision on the way to orbit. Add the Mars helicopter and Linux has left the planet many times over.
→ ZDNetLinux's original license forbade redistributing it for money. The switch to the GPL with release 0.12 legalized the businesses, distros and the billion-dollar industry that followed.
→ 0.12 release notesEvery one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers has run Linux since November 2017 — a clean sweep no other operating system has ever managed.
→ TOP500 stats
