August 25, 1991: After five months of development, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced in Teleecification Comp.OS.Minix the creation of a working prototype of the new Linux operating system. The core 0.0.1 had a size of 62 KB and contained about 10 thousand lines of source code. The modern Linux core now has over 35 million lines of code. A study in 2010 estimated the cost of developing a core similar to the modern Linux core from scratch to be over a billion US dollars.
Linux core was created as an alternative to the Minix operating system due to its limited license. Accusations of code copying were repelled by Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of Minix. A detailed comparison showed minimal similarities between Minix code and the early versions of Linux. Linus initially named the core “Freax” before it was named “Linux” by Ari Lemmke, resulting in the iconic brand we know today. The official mascot of Linux, Penguin Tux, was chosen through a competition held in 1996.
The growth of the Linux core’s code base has been significant over the years:
- 0.0.1 – September 1991, 10 thousand lines of code;
- 1.0.0 – March 1994, 176 thousand lines of code;
- 1.2.0 – March 1995, 311 thousand lines of code;
- 2.0.0 – June 1996, 778 thousand lines of code;
- 2.2.0 – January 1999, 1.8 million lines of code;
- 2.4.0 – January 2001, 3.4 million lines of code;
- 2.6.0 – December 2003, 5.9 million lines of code;
- 2.6.28 – December 2008, 10.2 million lines of code;
- 2.6.35 – August 2010, 13.4 million lines of code;