Happy 34th Birthday Linux [Video]

Yesterday, 34 years ago (August 25, 1991), an unknown student from the Department of Computer Science in Finland announced that a new free operating system project “was about to start.” Linus Benedict Torvalds explained that this operating system “was just a hobby and would not be as large or professional as GNU.” Of course, this marked the first public appearance of what is now known as the large collaborative project called Linux.Torvalds highlighted some important features of Linux, or features he was particularly proud of, in a newsgroup post. For example, the Linux leader mentioned the multi-threaded file system of the Linux operating system and that it contained no Minix code. However, he humbly admitted that the current code was unique to the Intel x86 platform, thus “not portable.”Last but not least, Torvalds announced that version 0.01 of this free operating system would be released next month (September 1991). It indeed was released on September 17, 1991, but the name of the operating system was decided by others at the last moment.

Clearly, Torvalds did not want to release his new operating system under the name Linux because it seemed too arrogant and self-promoting. Hepreferred Freax, a portmanteau of Free and X.

However, a colleague of Torvalds, who was also the administrator of the project’s FTP server, thought that the name “Freax” was not very appealing. So, without Torvalds’ permission, this colleague uploaded the operating system under the name “Linux” on September 1.

By 2025, we can confidently say that Linux is a tremendous success for the free software community. Moreover, it has proven to be highly portable and adaptable, capable of driving a wide variety of devices, and if these devices are connected end to end, they can easily showcase the curvature of the Earth.

And who knows, with the retirement of Windows 10 and the upcoming arrival of SteamOS on desktops, 2025 might just be the year of Linux. However, please give us some time.

An Interview With Linus Torvalds