Linux: A Revolutionary Operating System Created by Linus Torvalds
August 25, 1991, marked a significant milestone in the world of computing when 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced the creation of a working prototype for the Linux operating system. Torvalds made the announcement on Teleecification Comp.OS.Minix, and it quickly garnered attention from the tech community. The prototype was developed over five months, with Torvalds completing the porting of Bash 1.08 and GCC 1.40. The first public release of Linux occurred on September 17 of the same year.
The initial version, known as the core 0.0.1, had a compressed size of 62 KB and consisted of approximately 10 thousand lines of source code. It is worth noting that the modern Linux core has now surpassed 30 million lines of code. In 2010, a study commissioned by the European Union estimated the cost of developing a similar core from scratch to be over a billion US dollars. These estimates were based on calculations when the core had 13 million lines of code.
The creation of the Linux core was influenced by the Minix operating system, which Linus Torvalds found to have limitations due to its license. Some individuals later accused Torvalds of copying the code from certain Minix subsystems. However, this attack was refuted by Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of Minix. To address these allegations, a detailed comparison of Minix’s code and the first public versions of Linux was conducted by one of Tanenbaum’s students. The results of the research showed only four insignificant code block coincidences, which were attributed to the requirements of Posix and ANSI C.
Initially, Torvalds intended to name the core “Freax,” derived from the words “free,” “freake,” and “x” (for Unix). However, it was Ari Lemmke who ultimately named it “Linux” when he placed the core on the university FTP server. Lemmke decided to use the directory name “Linux,” contradicting Torvalds’ request for it to be named “Freax.” Later, businessman William Della Crow registered the Linux brand, intending to receive royalties over time. However, he eventually transferred all rights to the brand