It was 1991, and the ruthless agonies of the cold war was gradually coming to an end. There was an air of peace and tranquility that prevailed in the horizon. In the field of computing, a great future seemed to be in the offing, as powerful hardware pushed the limits of the computers beyond what anyone expected.

But still, something was missing.

And it was the none other than the Operating Systems, where a great void seemed to have appeared.

For one thing, DOS was still reigning supreme in its vast empire of personal computers. Bought by Bill Gates from a Seattle hacker for $50,000, the bare bones operating system had sneaked into every corner of the world by virtue of a clever marketing strategy. PC users had no other choice. Apple Macs were better, but with astronomical prices that nobody could afford, they remained a horizon away from the eager millions.

The other dedicated camp of computing was the Unix world. But Unix itself was far more expensive. In quest of big money, the Unix vendors priced it high enough to ensure small pc users stayed away from it. The source code of Unix, once taught in 1universities courtesy of Bell Labs, was now cautiously and not published publicly. To add to the frustration of PC users worldwide, the big players in the software market failed to provide an efficient solution to this problem.

A solution seemed to appear in form of MINIX. It was written from scratch by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a dutch professor who wanted to teach his students the inner workings of a real operating system. It was designed to run on the Intel 8086 microprocessors that had flooded the world market.

As an operating system, MINIX was not a superb one. But it had the advantage that the source code was available. Anyone who happened to get the book 'Operating System' by Tanenbaum could get hold of the 12,000 lines of code, written in C and assembly language. For the first time, an aspiring programmer or hacker could read the source codes of the operating system, which to that time the software vendors had guarded vigorously. Students of Computer Science all over the world poured over the book, reading through the codes to understand the very system that runs their computer.

And one of them was Linus Torvalds.

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b. New Baby in the Horizon

In 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds was a second year student of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker. The 21 year old sandy haired soft-spoken Finn loved to tinker with the power of the computers and the limits to which the system can be pushed. But all that was lacking was an operating system that could meet the demands of the professionals. MINIX was good, but still it was simply an operating system for the students, designed as a teaching tool rather than an industry strength one.

At that time, programmers worldwide were greatly inspired by the GNU project by Richard Stallman, a software movement to provide free and quality software. The much awaited Gnu C compiler was available by then, but there was still no operating system. Even MINIX had to be licensed. Work was going the GNU kernel HURD, but that was not supposed to come out within a few years.

That was too much of a delay for Linus.

In August 25, 1991 the historic post was sent to the MINIX news group by Linus .....

 From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
 Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
 Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
 Summary: small poll for my new operating system
 Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
 Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
 Organization: University of Helsinki

 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. I'd like any feedback on
 things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
 (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
 among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40),and
 things seem to work.This implies that I'll get something practical within a
 few months, andI'd like to know what features most people would want. Any
 suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
 Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
 PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
 It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
 will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's
 all I have :-(.

As it is apparent from the posting, Linus himself didn't believe that his creation was going to be big enough to change computing forever. Linux version 0.01 was released by mid september 1991, and was put on the net. Enthusiasm gathered around this new kid on the block, and codes were downloaded, tested, tweaked, and returned to Linus. 0.02 came on October 5th, along with this famous declaration from Linus:

 From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
 Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
 Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
 Message-ID: <1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
 Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
 Organization: University of Helsinki
 Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you
 without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your
; needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program
 working? Then this post might be just for you :-)
 As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has
 finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be depending on
 what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is?just version 0.02 (+1 (very
 small) patch already), but I've successfully run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.
 Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi (128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux.
 The directory also contains some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux
 (bash, update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel source is provided, as no minix code has been
 used. Library sources are only partially free, so that cannot be distributed currently. The system is able to compile
 "as-is" and has been known to work. Heh. Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can be found at the
 same place in /pub/gnu.
Linux version 0.03 came in a few weeks. By December came version 0.10. Still Linux was little more than in skeletal form. It had only support for AT hard disks, had no login ( booted directly to bash). version 0.11 was much better with support for multilingual keyboards, floppy disk drivers, support for VGA,EGA, Hercules etc. The version numbers went directly from 0.12 to 0.95 and 0.96 and so on. Soon the code went worldwide via ftp sites at Finland and elsewhere.