Fire Alarms Systems

Birthdays tend to feel a person is old, and not just the person they are celebrating, but those who, as remember it all began. And since we know that Windows XP 10 years old, was earlier this week, it 's only fair that we mention a tribute to Linux, Torvald the open source ideal Linus initially on the Usenet newsgroup shared' comp. os.minix "20 years ago yesterday.

Narrowing down a specific day on when Linux was created is no easy task and up for debate, but August 25, 1991 seems like as good a day as any to celebrate the beginning of Torvald's hobby operating system, as he described it at the time. Here's what he wrote 20 years ago:

Hello to everyone out there with Minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, will not be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has brewing since April, and begins to prepare. I would like some feedback on things people like / dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file system (for practical reasons) among other things).

I've currently ported bash (1.08) and gcc (1.40), and things seem to work. This means that I get something practical within a few months, and I would like to know what features most people would wish. All suggestions are welcome, but I will not promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes - it is free from Minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is not portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never support anything other than AT hard disks, as that's all I have :-(.

-Linus Torvalds

The rest is history, even if it 's funny to think that to connect at the time, Torvalds was really only interested in a terminal emulator on Unix machines. Now the Linux kernel is all over the place, on the Windows isn 't and Linux distributions are even able to play some games, if not native, found by software layers like wine.

Party-hearty Linux lover, and here 's to 20 + more.