Linus Torvalds Announces Linux

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a computer science student at the University of Helsinki, began designing a personal operating system project for his Intel 80386 computer. Seeking a system inspired by Unix, he initially constructed a task switcher written in assembly language alongside a terminal driver. On 25 August 1991, Torvalds posted an informal announcement to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix. He described the project as a free hobby that would not be large or professional, asking for feedback while noting that he had already ported early utilities including the Bash shell and the GNU C compiler, gcc.

The first public release, version 0.01, appeared on a Finnish network file server in September 1991. Because it lacked the components necessary to run autonomously, it still required an existing Minix environment for compilation and testing. Torvalds followed this on 5 October 1991 with version 0.02, presenting the first usable iteration capable of running several standard utilities. The software achieved a crucial self-hosting milestone in December with version 0.11, which could be compiled directly on a computer already running the Linux kernel itself.