Biography | Linus Torvalds — Linux 1.0 Was Compiled in Front of the Press Here, Sixteen Days After It Shipped

Linux 1.0 has two dates, and they get merged constantly.

The kernel was released on 14 March 1994, in a Usenet post that joked about being only two years late.

The event came sixteen days after that, on 30 March, in the computer science department at Teollisuuskatu 23.

The Finnish computer press was invited and a television crew came. Most of the ceremony consisted of compiling version 1.0 in the background while Torvalds and others explained what the thing was and who might want it.

His account of why it existed was economic rather than ideological. Commercial Unix for a PC cost so much that writing your own was the cheaper option.

The version numbers behind that moment show how the two years had gone: 0.12, then 0.95, 0.96, 0.96b, 0.96c. He had believed 1.0 was close for most of 1992.

The release announcement listed its contributors by name, dozens of them, most of whom he had never met.

Footage of the event survives and appears in Hannu Puttonen's documentary The Code, released in 2001.

The photograph here is the machine. An Ambra 486 Sprinta from 1993, an 80486SX running at 25 MHz with 8 MB of memory and a 100 MB hard disk, one of many PC clones in use at the department.

The card in the display case records it as Torvalds's machine for 1993 and 1994, the years either side of this event.

The word on the front panel is humalluoto, the name of a Finnish islet. His university account had lived on machines called klaava and kruuna.

Photo: mlabowicz, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.