In the weeks following his August 1991 Usenet announcement, Linus Torvalds continued refining and distributing his hobby operating system kernel through Helsinki University's servers. By late October, a small but growing community of programmers was compiling, testing, and contributing to what would eventually become Linux, the free operating system now running the majority of the world's servers and smartphones.
Linus Torvalds was a 21-year-old computer science student when he began writing his own operating system kernel as a personal project, partly out of frustration with the licensing restrictions of MINIX, the Unix-like teaching system he'd been using. His famous Usenet post that August, modestly describing his project as 'just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU,' undersold what was coming.
Through September and October of 1991, Torvalds released version 0.01 and then 0.02 of his kernel, distributing the source code via FTP and inviting anyone interested to compile it, break it, and send back patches. The early Linux kernel could barely do anything—it required MINIX to even compile—but the collaborative, open development model taking shape in these weeks would define its future. Combined with Richard Stallman's GNU tools, this kernel would grow into the foundation of countless servers, Android phones, and supercomputers, a testament to what a bored Finnish student with dial-up access could unleash upon the world.
Key people: Linus Torvalds