Today, 17 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones. In fact ask yourself this: if Linux didn't exist, would Google, Facebook, PHP, Apache, or MySQL?
Linus is the son of the journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds. He was attracted to computers from an early age and attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to study Computer Science. In 1991, he purchased a PC. As the computers at the university were Unix-based, he bought a copy of Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system. He was dissatisfied with it, and set about writing his own Unix clone from scratch, unaware of the enormity of the task.. After four months work, in his bedroom in his mother's apartment, he announced, in the MINIX newsgroup comp.os.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."
Torvalds called it Linux (short for Linus' MINIX). He took a break from his studies to work full-time on the project. By the end of October he was able to announce, 'It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable', and released Linux under the GPL (GNU General Public License). It soon became the focus of the largest collaborative 'open source' project ever undertaken, including geek superstars Fred van Kempen and Alan Cox.. Linus led the development work, not just by his technical brilliance, but by his engaging and genial personality.
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