Linus Torvalds announces Linux (1991)

Although I’ve read this probably a dozen times. What I think about this today, as I’m about to reviel my next project is that it’s so crazy how things evolved for open source. Nowadays people compete with companies and having an announcment like this usually includes :<p>- website explaining as a pitch what is better about your software<p>- ready to use examples and templates to support your claim<p>- branding with a logo that makes you look more professional<p>- issue tracker<p>- github repository ( even mirror of yours )<p>- bugfree software ready for production from day one.<p>And many more which I probably miss.<p>Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks seriously.

people give Jobs and Gates a lot of credit because they focused on commercial products that were marketed to the public -- Linus, for me, is probably the single most important person to technology (software) in the last 35 years. With Linux and Git alone, it as impactful and game changing in this industry that I can think of. I cannot think of any person that&#x27;s been this important to my career and my income.

&lt;sidebar&gt; I just finished reading the book &quot;Here Comes Everybody&quot; by Clay Shirky (circa 2008). In the book he mentions this very &quot;announcement.&quot;<p>What&#x27;s fascinating, per the book, is Linux was one of the first significant byproducts (if you will) of (internet) connectivity and how that enabled easy group &#x2F; team formation.<p>In the case of Linux, its growth helped to further connectivity, etc. That is, in creating Linux, it helped spread Linux.<p>Great problem to have ;)<p>&lt;&#x2F;sidebar&gt;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Here_Comes_Everybody" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Here_Comes_Everybody</a>

Such a humble announcement. I miss these kinds of projects. Most new projects today (by individuals or otherwise) are usually &quot;best of&quot;, &quot;world changing&quot;, &quot;ground shaking&quot;, emoji filled nonsense, usually biting more than the developer(s) can handle, causing a buggy mess.

I remember when I first installed Linux and was trying to find my way around (1994ish) and I couldn&#x27;t help but feel hopelessly behind, like everybody had way more experience than I did, and knew way more than I did.<p>Funny thing was, of course, that WAS true at the time, but it wasn&#x27;t a reason not to do it. Let that be a lesson to anyone who hasn&#x27;t learned the lesson themselves yet!

Wow, fascinating. I love the detail about probably never supporting anything other than AT hard disks and 386; isn&#x27;t it funny now that Linux supports more hardware than just about damn near any operating system, free or otherwise?

&gt; I&#x27;m doing a (free) operating system (__just a hobby, won&#x27;t be big and professional like gnu__) for 386(486) AT clones. [...] and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that&#x27;s all I have :-(.<p>__just a hobby, won&#x27;t be big and professional like X__ probably is how most of the startups get started.

Weirdly, every time I see this e-mail I curse AT&amp;T and think how much time and opportunity they cost the BSDs.

Just yesterday I was watching his interview from a couple of years ago (in Finnish, sadly he doesn&#x27;t do many of those any more).<p>He credited having a fair amount of free time during his 8 years of studying at University of Helsinki being a fairly big enabler of how Linux happened (or how he had time to work on it). I found that interesting

Is there something special about today that this is being posted again?

<i>&quot;PS. Yes - it&#x27;s free of any minix code&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s kind of interesting now. Most Linux installations today coexist with a management processor running Minix. So what was a sort of mild rivalry is now a détente.

Debate Question: would Linux have done so well without the wintel monopoly&#x2F;monoculture on which it spread?

&gt; It is NOT protable<p>Made me laugh, as I don&#x27;t know any other OS that runs on such a variety of hardware nowadays ;-)

&gt; Summary: small poll for my new operating system<p>I&#x27;m intrigued. Does the email standard actually include a &#x27;summary&#x27; field? If so, why doesn&#x27;t that still exist?

One question: Being noob at OS stuff, I feel quite impressed that bash and GCC could work on the Linux that Linus built on his own. But everybody says that Linux really was something interesting as soon as a proper memory management was added to it. And that was done, but not by Linus. So, which achievement sounds to you the most impressive? Building the first Linux? Or adding that (afaiu, critical) memory management feature?

The photo shows a beer bottle and he refers to the development as &quot;brewing&quot;. Being a home brewing enthusiast - that sure caught my attention.

&quot;Fun fact&quot;: I just noticed that he is using an old email address, after that I believe it was changed to @cs.helsinki.fi and after @helsinki.fi<p>&quot; At the moment, the City of Helsinki uses the address Hel.fi, while the address Helsinki.fi belongs to the University of Helsinki.&quot;[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hel.fi&#x2F;helsinki&#x2F;en&#x2F;administration&#x2F;information&#x2F;information&#x2F;nic.helsinki&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hel.fi&#x2F;helsinki&#x2F;en&#x2F;administration&#x2F;information&#x2F;in...</a>

Curious - what about Linux in particular made people interested in it so much as opposed to contributing to some *BSD, or Hurd? Strictly the license?

Didn’t people on usenet pay his computer off?

In 1991 I printed MINIX code and was studying it

this is rather inspiring. humble beginnings, mountains moved.

I can only imagine the first comment was someone telling him it would never work.

Shameless plug of my related submission of yesterday : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18345058" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18345058</a><p>If someone can explain it, I&#x27;m open to new hypothesis.