Twenty years of Linux development

As we reported earlier this year, 2011 has already seen some important anniversaries: back in March it was 25 years since Microsoft started selling its shares on the stock exchange, and a week later it was 20 years since the relase of the game Lemmings.

On August 21, 1991, the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was being held under house arrest in his luxury villa in the Crimea. In the Guardian recently, the paper's then Russian correspondent Jonathan Steele wrote about how he had the scoop on the story but wasn't able to tell it because he lacked the technology to do so. Nowadays, it would be much easier.

That's partly down to an invention that was being worked on not far from Moscow, in Finland. In August 1991 a 21-year-old University of Helsinki student called Linus Torvalds was working on a new operating system.

Picture of Linus Torvalds used and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License; picture by linuxmag.com/Martin Streicher.

Back in those days, when the world wide web was still a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was seven years old, the best way to communicate online was Usenet, a loose collection of online discussion groups. In order to post or read messages you'd have to log on to a local service provider, get the latest list of messages, add your own and then send it. That would normally be two phone calls - one to send and one to receive - because it was relatively expensive to make even a local call.

That technical barrier tended to limit Usenet to the more technical users, and on 26 August 1991, a user calling himself Linus Benedict Torvalds posted to a group called comp.os.minix (Minix was and is the name of a hobbyist operating system, so called because it's a miniature version of Unix).

Linus said:

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

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 :-(.

You can read the full post (along with the subsequent comments thread) through Google's Groups archive by clicking here.

Torvalds had bought his PC, an IBM 80386, back in January that year, and having already created a Pacman-clone, he wanted to try his hand at something more complicated, and eventually realised he'd ended up with an operating system. He'd originally wanted to call the new operating system Freax, having dismissed the name Linux as too egotistical, but he was persuaded to go back to it.

Version 0.01 of the Linux kernel (the core of the operating system) was released in September 1991, version 0.02 a month later, and it took until 1994 for version 1.0 to come out. The original release, uploaded to the university's FTP server, had 10,239 lines of code. The first release version in 1994 had grown to 176,250 lines of code.

In 1992 Linux spawned its own newsgroup, alt.os.linux, the first post to which was on 19 January that year. In March the newsgroup was given more legitimacy by being moved to the comp (computing) tree from the alt (alternative) one: alt.os.linux became comp.os.linux.

Since then Linux has grown and grown. It may not have much of a hold on personal computers (the laptops and desktops most of us use) but you probably use Linux every day even if you don't know it. Bank cash machines, website servers and phones (the Android mobile operating system is based upon the Linux kernel) all use it, or use technology developed as part of Linux.

It's quite an achievement for something that its creator described as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional".