2 years ago

Category: Microsoft, android

When I think back to 1991 and try to remember where I was at that time, it was likely somewhere involving an x286 and a bunch of five and a half-inch floppy disks, with the screech of a 1200 baud modem in the background while logging into Prodigy and hoping against hope that my parents wouldn’t pick up the phone line. Meanwhile, halfway across the planet, in both literal and seemingly figurative terms, Linus Torvalds was busy building the operating system that would come to run much of the internet we know today. That’s right, this week, the open source Linux operating system turned 30, at least by one accepted standard of when it started. The anniversary being celebrated is that of (one of) the first times Linus publicly mentioned the new operating system in a Usenet message, which at the time he referred to as “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”

He notes that Torvalds says you can argue that Linux has four birthdays, with the first dating back to July 3 of that same year, but my theory is that it’s simply the text of that message (just a hobby!) that makes it stand out as one for celebration.