How it began
Linus Torvalds, born in Helsinki in 1969, enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988. In January 1991 he bought a personal computer with an Intel 386 processor and began using Minix, a Unix-inspired teaching system. That year he started work on a kernel of his own. On August 25, 1991 he told the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he was doing a free operating system, "just a hobby". The first prototypes were released on the Internet in late 1991 from an FTP server at his university.
Before it existed
Torvalds first met Unix in 1990 on a university MicroVAX running ULTRIX. On his own PC he used Minix, which Andrew Tanenbaum had created as a teaching tool. Torvalds's own account of the period, written in July 1992, describes a personal project that grew out of his interest in POSIX standards and in features he wanted as a user, and a first version, 0.01, with minimal functionality.
How it spread
Torvalds invited feedback from other users and developers from the start, and a team of volunteers formed around the kernel. Version 0.03 was the first somewhat usable release, and version 0.12 added features such as paging. His original license forbade commercial use; he later switched the kernel to the GNU General Public License version 2. Version 1.0 was released in March 1994. The name came from Ari Lemmke, who ran the FTP server and called the directory "linux"; Torvalds had wanted to call it Freax.
What lasted
Torvalds moved to California in 1997 to work at Transmeta while continuing to oversee the kernel. From 2003 he worked on it full time, backed by the Open Source Development Labs, a consortium that included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Red Hat. That body merged with the Free Standards Group in 2007 to form the Linux Foundation. In 2012 he shared the Millennium Technology Prize for creating a new open source operating system kernel. The Computer History Museum describes Linux as a widely used operating system and notes that Torvalds remains the final authority on what new code enters the standard kernel. He works at the Linux Foundation as lead developer of the kernel.
