Linux in the Lab

On August 25, 1991, a student named Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki posted an innocuous message to an Internet bulletin board. "Hello everybody out there using minix," he wrote on the comp.os.minix newsgroup. "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." Minix was a commercial UNIX product, and Torvalds, who was building a free variant of it, was taking feature requests.

Thirteen years later Torvalds' project, called Linux ("Linus" Minix"), has become a wildly popular alternative to Windows and Mac OS. The Linux Counter Web site (counter.li.org) estimates that 18 million people worldwide use the operating system. Most have downloaded the software for free or purchased o...

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