20 years of Linux

August 25 is considered the birthday of Linux, since it was on this day in 1991 that Linus Torvalds published his landmark message in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.ix, announcing the advent of Linux (it wasn’t called that at the time). No one at that time could have imagined what this operating system would become in 20 years, but now Linux has spread everywhere and no one doubts the huge success of this once amateur project.

Translation of the very announcement of Linus Torvalds:

Hello to all those who use minix - I am doing a (free) operating system (this is just a hobby, not as big and professional as GNU) for 386 (486) AT clones. This system has been written since April and will be ready soon. I want to get any feedback on things that people like / dislike in minix, since my OS is similar to it (the same file system device (for practical reasons), among other things).

Currently I have ported bash (1.08) and gcc (1.40), and it looks like these programs work. This means that I will get something practical in the next few months, and I want to know what features most people want. Any suggestions are accepted, but I do not promise that I will implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
')
Ps. Yes - there is no minix code in it, and there will be a multi-threaded FS. The system is NON-ADAPTABLE (uses Intel 386 commands, etc.) and will probably only support AT hard drives, since that's all I have :-(

Happy birthday, Linux, and long life!