
Linus Torvalds announces Linux (1991) - yurisagalov
https://web.archive.org/web/20100104211620/http://www.linux.org/people/linus_post.html
======
drinchev
Although I’ve read this probably a dozen times. What I think about this today,
as I’m about to reviel my next project is that it’s so crazy how things
evolved for open source. Nowadays people compete with companies and having an
announcment like this usually includes :

\- website explaining as a pitch what is better about your software

\- ready to use examples and templates to support your claim

\- branding with a logo that makes you look more professional

\- issue tracker

\- github repository ( even mirror of yours )

\- bugfree software ready for production from day one.

And many more which I probably miss.

Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks
seriously.

~~~
duxup
And yet with all that ... I likely still won't understand what exactly the
product or thing is or does.

Meanwhile I understand Linus's email well enough.

~~~
simonh
I can't count the number of times I've read an announcement of some OSS
project, gone to the project home page, read it all and still had absolutely
no idea what it was, what it did or why it might be important.

It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though. Getting bash
and gcc working and a multithreaded FS is no mean feat, and is enough for
other people to actually make useful contributions without excessive pain.

~~~
jonny_eh
It probably means you're not the target audience.

~~~
lloydde
Most often it is that the author is so involved they forget to given enough
context. They are so passionate about a topic, but don’t realize that others
do not drink the same Kool-Aid every day.

More than half of the emails I get from technology companies fail to start
with a reminder of what their product or service does. I see this much, much
less frequently with consumer products — better marketing.

------
gjmacd
people give Jobs and Gates a lot of credit because they focused on commercial
products that were marketed to the public -- Linus, for me, is probably the
single most important person to technology (software) in the last 35 years.
With Linux and Git alone, it as impactful and game changing in this industry
that I can think of. I cannot think of any person that's been this important
to my career and my income.

~~~
dr_teh
Somewhere in a cavern full of sandals, a Stallmanu is quietly weeping.

~~~
mikekchar
I really dislike this snarky comment, but rather than down vote it, I thought
I'd give an alternate view.

I was around at the time that Linux was born. I remember the HURD. I had done
some work on Mach while I was in university and I was hugely interested in
working on the HURD. I sent email to MIB and essentially received a reply "We
don't need you kid". But this is the way it was at the time. People working on
GNU were used to doing things in a Cathedral fashion (to put it in ESR's
terms). They had small teams where only a few trusted people had input. The
rest were users, not collaborators.

The internet was not common at that point and we didn't have things like
distributed source repositories. Development was usually done using CVS and
you had to be a core contributor to have access. You got access to source code
from releases only. And while some projects had fairly regular releases, some
did not. For the HURD, I think the idea was that there was no point to having
regular releases because it wasn't even self hosting yet.

Linus showed up and changed the world. He said, "Here's this thing I've been
working on" and he didn't care who you were. If you sent him a patch, he
looked at it. This was completely different from how things used to work for
most projects. Linus didn't make you sign over your copyright. He didn't vet
you as a core or non-core developer. He just took your patch and evaluated it
on its technical merits.

The whole Bazaar approach that is common today, stems from how Linus ran
kernel development right from the start. It changed everything in free
software development because it was just 100x better. No friction. Welcoming.
Not discriminatory.

But if you think RMS is _sad_ about this state of affairs, I think you are
terribly mistaken. The HURD was a failure because the world changed under
them. Linus came around and showed everybody how software freedom is supposed
to work in practice. This took a powerful but small group and expanded its
reach to the everyday programmer. RMS's dream of a world where normal
developers _valued_ free software over proprietary software came about
_because_ of this shift -- and he's smart enough to realise it.

RMS was clumsy about the whole GNU/Linux thing, but Linux only existed because
GNU existed. Back in the day, the first thing I would do when I got a new Unix
box was to install GNU -- because it was massively better than whatever crap
came with the Unix system. Even now, despite the advances of BSD systems, I
would _still_ install GNU on top of a BSD kernel if I was running BSD.

Occasionally I hear people asking the question, "If Android is running Linux,
why can't I run my Linux apps on my phone?" It drives me crazy. It's because
you've got an Android/Linux box instead of a GNU/Linux box. The bit you want
is GNU, not Linux. This is precisely why people like RMS wanted to stress the
importance of GNU in the equation. I don't agree with his approach, but it's
foolish to deny the basis of the argument.

Without RMS's vision, we would not be where we are today. I lived in the world
where I had to use $5k per seat proprietary libraries to get anything done. I
lived in the world where large corporations who built compilers told me what I
was allowed to build. RMS rescued us from that. ESR gave us a vocabulary with
which to talk about this stuff. He categorised the kinds of ways people
approached things and allowed us to think critically about what we were doing.
Linus showed us how to actually make it work. All of these people have
disagreed with specific things the others have said, but they also show
massive respect for one another -- for good reason. Without them, our lives as
developers would be infinitely worse.

~~~
mayankkaizen
That was quite a story. Younger people like me just don't know/appreciate how
history actually developed and why things are the way they are.

------
chiefalchemist
<sidebar> I just finished reading the book "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay
Shirky (circa 2008). In the book he mentions this very "announcement."

What's fascinating, per the book, is Linux was one of the first significant
byproducts (if you will) of (internet) connectivity and how that enabled easy
group / team formation.

In the case of Linux, its growth helped to further connectivity, etc. That is,
in creating Linux, it helped spread Linux.

Great problem to have ;)

</sidebar>

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody)

~~~
tytso
I don't know that I would call Linux "one of the first". Usenet had been
around for a long time, and there were plenty of projects that were enabled
via Usenet and mailing lists. For example, perl predates Linux by four years.

~~~
acheron
It's also why NetHack (from 1987) was called "Net"Hack.

~~~
bch
And “Net”BSD. Collaborating over the Internet was novel at the time.

------
LeoNatan25
Such a humble announcement. I miss these kinds of projects. Most new projects
today (by individuals or otherwise) are usually "best of", "world changing",
"ground shaking", emoji filled nonsense, usually biting more than the
developer(s) can handle, causing a buggy mess.

~~~
outside1234
To be clear, Linux was definitely a buggy mess at the beginning and definitely
more than Linus could handle, but they got through that by building community
around fixing all of that.

~~~
LeoNatan25
That's fine, bugs are acceptable and expected as long as expectations are set
accordingly. It seems clear from the start that the project didn't promise the
world and its sister.

------
rconti
I remember when I first installed Linux and was trying to find my way around
(1994ish) and I couldn't help but feel hopelessly behind, like everybody had
way more experience than I did, and knew way more than I did.

Funny thing was, of course, that WAS true at the time, but it wasn't a reason
not to do it. Let that be a lesson to anyone who hasn't learned the lesson
themselves yet!

~~~
raldi
This is a great example of the Inspection Paradox, mentioned on HN earlier
this week:

[https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-inspection-
para...](https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-inspection-paradox-is-
everywhere.html)

~~~
rconti
This is great! Thank you!

------
jchw
Wow, fascinating. I love the detail about probably never supporting anything
other than AT hard disks and 386; isn't it funny now that Linux supports more
hardware than just about damn near any operating system, free or otherwise?

~~~
caf
...and it doesn't support 386 anymore!

------
myth_buster
> I'm doing a (free) operating system (__just a hobby, won't be big and
> professional like gnu__) for 386(486) AT clones. [...] and it probably never
> will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

__just a hobby, won't be big and professional like X__ probably is how most of
the startups get started.

~~~
segmondy
Not anymore. :-(

Sell before you build a product!

Don't build what you want, build what other's want!

Build what other's are going to pay money for, hell, sell it, get a contract
before you write a line of code!

If you don't have a market size of multiple billions is not worth doing!

Are you going to make billions upon billions? No? don't do it!

Hobby? It's not even worth of a side project.

~~~
adventured
I'm currently doing the opposite of every 'rule' and loving it.

Building what I want, because I want it to exist. Showing it to nobody else to
test or get feedback on; no focus groups, no beta testing, no external input.
Solo founder effort. Not taking VC; not under any circumstances or terms. Not
selling or promoting anything before it launches. It's commercially minimalist
by design and ethos, ideally it takes in the least amount of money necessary
to fund its own expansion. There's no exit, hopefully it lasts perpetually; I
aim to at least guarantee and pursue its operation for the next decade (it'll
take that long to really build it out). It's thin on both the front and back
ends, inexpensive to run and scale. Something like it doesn't currently exist
and it will benefit humanity very modestly if I get it up to scale.

It's the first time in the last 20 years I've built something very large in
scope that wasn't about making money in any manner. Something that is more
important than my own ambitions in life. Going to launch it with a Show HN in
the next two months or so. Hopefully it works out, either way it was a lot of
fun to build (it will have likely taken seven or eight months of work from
conception to kicking it out the door).

~~~
nimonian
This was probably your intention, but I really want to know what it is.

------
protomyth
Weirdly, every time I see this e-mail I curse AT&T and think how much time and
opportunity they cost the BSDs.

------
dharma1
Just yesterday I was watching his interview from a couple of years ago (in
Finnish, sadly he doesn't do many of those any more).

He credited having a fair amount of free time during his 8 years of studying
at University of Helsinki being a fairly big enabler of how Linux happened (or
how he had time to work on it). I found that interesting

~~~
pimeys
I'm from the Helsinki University of Technology and it was not uncommon that
people got their masters degree in about 10 years of studying and working
simultaneously.

------
ulkesh
Is there something special about today that this is being posted again?

------
tyingq
_" PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code"_

That's kind of interesting now. Most Linux installations today coexist with a
management processor running Minix. So what was a sort of mild rivalry is now
a détente.

~~~
znaji
I'd say most Linux installations today are Android mobiles. Do those have
Minix too?

~~~
tyingq
No, but Android does use a different microkernel (LK) as it's bootloader.

It's also likely that Google will replace Linux on Android with Fuschia, yet
another microkernel OS, derived from LK.

------
codeulike
Debate Question: would Linux have done so well without the wintel
monopoly/monoculture on which it spread?

~~~
dragonwriter
You mean “IBM PC clone”. “Wintel” wasn't really a thing until Microsoft’s
dominant consumer and business OSs were Windows, starting with Windows 95, by
which point Linux had already done a lot of spreading.

~~~
rwmj
It's because MS-DOS and to a lesser extent Windows 3 was so bad at isolating
you from the hardware that all the hardware had to be identical. If MS-DOS had
been more like, say, CP/M then we would have had loads of weird machines from
different manufacturers isolated from the software by proprietary BIOS[1]
blobs. This would have made it harder to provide a useful Linux that worked
across multiple machines.

[1] I mean "BIOS" in the CP/M sense of a layer that completely abstracted the
hardware to the BDOS.

~~~
slededit
Q-DOS from which MS-DOS is derived is basically a clone of CP/M. I've written
a CP/M bios for fun to bootstrap my IMSAI. It's not really that high level.
You got even more from IBM's BIOS but of course that was too slow for what
people wanted to do with those machines - so everyone talked to the hardware
directly.

In those days it didn't matter what you were doing - the hardware was too
slow. It's not like today where you can trade off performance for reliability
or cleanliness. People praise Wozniak for his genius of trading hardware for
software, but the tight coupling made it really hard to make future
iterations. People didn't value upwards compatibility yet.

------
arendtio
> It is NOT protable

Made me laugh, as I don't know any other OS that runs on such a variety of
hardware nowadays ;-)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
NetBSD!

------
mabbo
> Summary: small poll for my new operating system

I'm intrigued. Does the email standard actually include a 'summary' field? If
so, why doesn't that still exist?

~~~
macintux
As zerohp said, Usenet. Here's an RFC link I just chased down:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5536#section-3.2.11](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5536#section-3.2.11)

------
lolive
One question: Being noob at OS stuff, I feel quite impressed that bash and GCC
could work on the Linux that Linus built on his own. But everybody says that
Linux really was something interesting as soon as a proper memory management
was added to it. And that was done, but not by Linus. So, which achievement
sounds to you the most impressive? Building the first Linux? Or adding that
(afaiu, critical) memory management feature?

~~~
kyberias
What do you think that "proper memory management" was?

Linus himself implemented virtual memory support with paging to disc in Linux
version 0.12 (Jan 1992). This made people to switch from Minix to Linux.

Maybe you mix it up with some other important feature? X was ported to Linux
by Orest Zborowski in 92. Or networking? That was not a one-man show.

------
rv-de
The photo shows a beer bottle and he refers to the development as "brewing".
Being a home brewing enthusiast - that sure caught my attention.

------
asdojasdosadsa
"Fun fact": I just noticed that he is using an old email address, after that I
believe it was changed to @cs.helsinki.fi and after @helsinki.fi

" At the moment, the City of Helsinki uses the address Hel.fi, while the
address Helsinki.fi belongs to the University of Helsinki."[1]

[1]
[https://www.hel.fi/helsinki/en/administration/information/in...](https://www.hel.fi/helsinki/en/administration/information/information/nic.helsinki/)

------
PopsiclePete
Curious - what about Linux in particular made people interested in it so much
as opposed to contributing to some *BSD, or Hurd? Strictly the license?

~~~
nineteen999
In 1991, the BSD's as we know them today didn't exist.

    
    
      386BSD - 1992
      FreeBSD - 1993
      NetBSD - 1993
      OpenBSD - 1996
    

There were also ongoing lawsuits concerning AT&T code:

    
    
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD#History 
    

I'm not 100% sure but from memory I don't believe the HURD (Mach-based) kernel
was even bootable in 1991. I didn't see bootable HURD releases till much later
in the 1990's and they were notoriously unstable.

------
bluedino
Didn’t people on usenet pay his computer off?

------
known
In 1991 I printed MINIX code and was studying it

------
jonnycomputer
this is rather inspiring. humble beginnings, mountains moved.

------
empath75
I can only imagine the first comment was someone telling him it would never
work.

~~~
tyingq
Nope:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.os.minix/dlNt...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA)

Though Usenet could get toxic at times.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I like how the first comment muses about porting it to Amiga, and Linus
reiterates that no, sorry, it's _completely_ impossible to port. Just way too
hardware-dependent, don't even bother trying.

------
antpls
Shameless plug of my related submission of yesterday :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18345058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18345058)

If someone can explain it, I'm open to new hypothesis.

