The Dawn of Linux

Linux is all over the place. Seriously.

It is powering your smartphone, a drone network, NASA’s international space station, supercomputers, mainframes and your grandma’s IP webcam.

But how did it all start?

Back in August 1991, a young Finnish software engineer named Linus Torvalds hacked his way to create a free operating system.

He couldn’t even realize at that point how much of an impact it will have on the world today:

While discussion steers, Linus makes it pretty obvious that the Linux OS is so entirely integrated and dependent on the 386 processor architecture and it will be a nightmare to port it to other CPU/hardware.

Linus doesn’t promise it will be anything bigger than minix, but the Free Software spirit is something that Linus has embraced dearly as one who is living the hacker culture himself:

And here’s how software engineers do marketing:

Just a couple of months later and Linus is shooting out marketing messages to get more developers involved. He is definitely aiming at all those hackers just waiting to feed their curiosity.

Very quickly the Linux OS has matured towards developer-centric audience, and nowadays power our day to day gadgets and desktops.
Back in those days, many inter-related events were happening together — RMS’s free software movement, Linus’s free OS project, the rise of personal computers and telecommunications — all of which have contributed to the dawn of Linux.

My first encounter with Linux was when I was about 15.
My friend dropped a RedHat Linux 5 install on my laptop.
Everything changed for me then.

What was yours…?

Photo Credits: Wikipedia, Athanasios Kasampalis on Flickr
Source: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html