Biography | Linus Torvalds — Somebody Else Named Linux, on a Server at This Address

The man who wrote Linux did not name it. He wanted to call it Freax. The word compressed free, freak and the x that every Unix-like system seemed to need. His files sat under that name for about half a year. On 17 September 1991 he uploaded the first release, version 0.01, to the file server nic.funet.fi, then emailed the handful of people who had answered his August post. Ari Lemmke was a teaching assistant at the Helsinki University of Technology and one of the volunteers who administered that server. He disliked Freax, and created the directory /pub/OS/Linux instead, without asking. Torvalds had considered the name himself and rejected it as too egotistical. He accepted it afterwards, and never got around to changing it back. The server belonged to FUNET, the network linking Finnish universities and research institutes, and CSC describes nic.funet.fi as its own file server. CSC's address through those years was Tietotie 6 in Otaniemi, a few hundred metres from Lemmke's university across the same campus district. Version 0.01 was roughly ten thousand lines. It could not build itself, needed MINIX to compile it, and booted to little more than a shell. Nothing marks any of this on the site, and the exact position of the machine room inside the complex is not documented. The red brick block was built as an office building for the computing company Tieto, its oldest parts dating from 1975. It was stripped back and rebuilt across 2018 and 2019 as Tietokylä. Since autumn 2019 the address has held an upper secondary school and a public library. The place where Linux got its name is now somewhere teenagers sit their exams. Photo: Markus Säynevirta, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Tietotie 6 complex in September 2019, after conversion. Second image: the public library on the ground floor of the same complex. Photo: Paju, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.