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It’s August 25th were I sit and I’m celebrating Linux’s 30th birthday with a good champagne and a delicious cake, so please join me to celebrate 30 freaking awesome years of Linux and many more to come!
That’s right, it’s been 30 years since 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Benedict Torvalds made his now-famous announcement on the day of August 25th, 1991, on the comp.os.minix news group, saying that he is working on a free operating system for 386(486) AT clones as a “hobby.”
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 portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
Well, that “hobby” turned into something massive in only 30 years (how time flies), and Linux now powers almost every smart device around you, including your Android smartphone, Amazon Alexa and Google Home smart assistants, big screen TV, smart fridge, smart lights, and especially your Wi-Fi router.
But Linux is everywhere around us, even if we don’t use it. Linux powers 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, it powers the Wall Street, it powers satellites and the ISS (International Space Station), it powers airplanes, and it even powers the whole Internet. (yes, 99.9% of the websites you are visiting daily are sitting on a Linux-powered server, including 9to5Linux).
Every year, people say “this is the year of the Linux desktop,” but we who use Linux every single day know that it was always the year of the Linux desktop, no matter what the numbers say. And today marks 30 freaking awesome years of Linux and personally I’m overjoyed to have Linux in my life for more than 20 of them.
With that in mind, if it’s August 25th where you live, let’s raise the glass and wish Linux a happy 30th birthday, even if you’re one of those people who like to celebrate Linux’s birthday on September 17th, when the first public release was published by Linus Torvalds, who believes that both of these dates are valid.
Last updated 3 years ago
