Tux Machines

33 years of Linux

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 07, 2024

On 5 October 1991, a young Finnish student named Linus Torvalds publicly released the first few lines of code for a small operating system project he had wanted to call “Freax” — a portmanteau of free, freak, and UNIX.

The 21-year-old Torvalds had begun hacking on the project several months earlier but only revealed that he was working on a “hobby” operating system in a Usenet post on 25 August 1991.

Usenet is a distributed discussion system that predates the World Wide Web and was a precursor to modern web forums.

“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,” Torvalds wrote.

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