Happy 32nd birthday Linux Kernel!

On 26 August 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds, a Finnish university student, told the members of the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he was working on the operating system as a “hobby”. This date is therefore considered by many enthusiasts to be the real birthday of the Linux Kernel.

In an email, Linus said that the operating system he was working on was just a hobby project, and would not be as large and specialised as GNU.

But instead of releasing Linux on that day, 26 August, Linus made Linux 0.01 (which Linus named “FREAX”) available privately to a select group of friends on the Finnish Universities and Research Network’s (FUNET’s) FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) on 17 September, when it was downloaded by only one or two people.

The first public release, Linux 0.02, was on 5 October, and the first standalone version without Minix was 0.11, released on Christmas Day that year.