Linux Kernel Turned 28 this week

August 25th 1991 was when Linus Torvalds, first announced that he was working on an operating system based on MINIX.

In early 1991 he purchased an IBM-compatible pc that came with the MS-DOS operating system. Linus wasn’t satisfied with MS-DOS and wanted to use a UNIX operating system just like he did at school.  When he tried to by UNIX for personal use, he found that the least expensive UNIX he could buy was about $5,000 USD (9,418 USD current inflation 2018-19).


Torvald's email was sent to world/comp.os.minix newsgroup asking for suggestions for features they would like included.

He wrote:

Hello everybody out there using 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. 

Linus and over 100 developers worked on Linux over the next couple of years and in March of 1994, version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was released. When it was released, it contained 176,250 lines of code. Today there is over 25,584,633 lines of code in the Linux 5.0