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Celebrating the 28th Anniversary of the Linux Kernel

Full Story Blog Post Sunday, August 25, 2019 in Computer   View 1 Comment 1 Comment
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Exactly 28 years ago today, a 21-year-old student named Linus Torvalds made a fateful announcement on the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix.
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August 25th 1991 was when Linus Torvalds, first announced that he was working on an operating system based on MINIX. At the time Torvalds, then 21, was studying at Finland's University of Helsinki. He'd learned about MINIX from Andrew Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and at the beginning of 1991 bought a 386-based PC clone, installed a copy of MINIX and started work on his one-man cloned operating system. He graduated in 1996 with a Masters degree having submitted a thesis titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.

Torvald's email was sent to world/comp.os.minix newsgroup asking for suggestions for features they would like included. He wrote:
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.
Back in 1991 the fledgling operating system didn't have a name, according to Joey Sneddon's 27 Interesting Facts about Linux.


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