'Just a hobby, won't be big': Linus Torvalds introduced Linux 35 years ago - and almost called it Freax
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ZDNET's key takeaways
- At the start, Torvalds had no clue how big Linux would become.
- Some early developers still work on Linux today.
- Torvalds has no intention of ever stopping work on Linux.
In 1991, Unix was an important but secondary x86 operating system. That year, on Aug. 25, a Finnish graduate student named Linus Benedict Torvalds announced on the Usenet group comp.os.minix that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
No one knew it, not even Torvalds, but the technology world was about to change forever.
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