Biography | Linus Torvalds — The Message That Started Linux Went Out From This Department

Linux is usually said to have started in a student flat. The message that told the world about it went out under the name of this building.

At 20:57 GMT on 25 August 1991, a 21-year-old computer science student posted to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix.

The From line read torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI. The Organization line read University of Helsinki.

His department had moved into Teollisuuskatu 23, in the old industrial quarter of Vallila, in 1987.

The post was a question rather than an announcement. He wanted to know what users of MINIX, the teaching operating system written by Andrew Tanenbaum, felt was missing from it.

The line everyone remembers came next. He described what he was building as a hobby, and said it would not be big and professional like GNU.

He had been at it since April. He had ported bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40, and thought he might have something practical within a few months.

He also warned that the thing was tied to the 386 and would probably never support anything beyond AT hard disks, because that was all the hardware he owned.

The code itself was written at home, on a PC he had bought for himself. What the university supplied was everything around the code: a Unix account, a Usenet feed, and readers who knew what a task switcher was.

There is a small oddity in the message. The header says klaava and the signature says kruuna, two different university machines, named after the tails and heads of a tossed coin.

This is the date the world celebrates. The software itself would not exist in public form for another three weeks.

The department left for the new Kumpula campus in 2004, and the address is now listed as a campus of the city's vocational college. No free photograph of the building could be found, so the picture here is of Torvalds himself, nine years after the post.

Photo: Brian Hankins, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Torvalds at LinuxWorld in New York, 3 February 2000.

Second image: Teollisuuskatu in 2014, the street rather than the department building. Photo: jampe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.