This week marked the 30th anniversary of the Linux operating system, the operating system that most internet users unknowingly interact with every day without being active users.
Linux was originally a hobby project created by Linus Torvalds from Finland. On 25 August 1991, Torvalds sent a message to a Usenet group of Minix users in which he told them, very modestly, that he was creating a free operating system from a Unix-based system and asked for advice on what features others thought the system should include.
Torvalds originally intended the system to be called Freax, a combination of the word free, freak and X to indicate that it was a Unix system.
This is what his message said:
"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)."
Torvalds' colleague Ari Lemmke at the Helsinki University of Technology, however, thought Linux was a better name. Torvalds initially disagreed, thinking it sounded too egotistical, but then changed his mind.
1992 saw the release of the first complete packages of Linux that can be used as an operating system. 1994 saw the release of version 1.0 and two years later 2.0.
In the same year, the mascot Tux, the now famous penguin, was launched. Torvalds has said that the reason for this was that he was bitten by a penguin at a zoo as a child.
The rivalry with software giant Microsoft has been fierce over the years. In 1999, Linux users organised a so-called "Windows refund day" where they queued outside Microsoft offices in several different countries and demanded their money back because they believed they had been forced to use Windows when they bought their computers. In 2001, Microsoft's then CEO Steve Ballmer also called Linux "a cancer that infects everything it touches".
In 2007, Asus launched one of the first successful computers with Linux pre-installed. The following year, Android was also launched in version 1.0, which is de facto Linux-based.
In 2017, Linux was recognised as being used by the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.
Linux-based operating systems continue to gain ground worldwide. As a result of restrictions related to the 'corona crisis', the share of Linux users increasedThis is believed to be due to the fact that many people were in the process of switching earlier, but were only given sufficient time to make the transition.
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