Technology History | University of Helsinki — Just a Hobby, Posted at Nine in the Evening

The most quoted line in the history of free software was a throwaway aside in a poll.

On 25 August 1991, at 20:57 GMT, a twenty-one-year-old student posted to the newsgroup comp.os.minix under the subject line "What would you like to see most in minix?"

The body explained that he was writing a free operating system, and added, in brackets, that it was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu".

Linus Torvalds was asking Minix users what the system lacked. He was not announcing a release.

The post said the work had been brewing since April, that he had ported bash and gcc, and that the thing was starting to get ready.

He was not promising to implement anyone's suggestions.

That is the first correction. The second is the date itself.

25 August is celebrated as Linux's birthday, and Torvalds has said he considers 17 September 1991 the real one — the day he put version 0.01 on an FTP server at the Finnish University Network and told the people who had answered his poll.

The kernel had been called Freax before it was called Linux.

The licence everyone associates with it came later still, with version 0.12 in January 1992.

There is a third thing worth being straight about, which is this pin.

Torvalds wrote the code on his own machine at home, and this memory is anchored at the University of Helsinki because that is the institution named in the post's header and the network the message left through — not because the work happened in this building.

His flat is a private home and gets no pin here.

The main building on Fabianinkatu is the university's public face, open to visitors, and it stands for the address in that header rather than for a room.

Nothing on the site marks any of this, which is the usual condition of things that began as a message rather than a machine.

Photo: the University of Helsinki main building, geotagged at the site.

Sources: the archived comp.os.minix post of 25 August 1991; Ars Technica's 1996 interview with Torvalds; Linux release timelines.

Photo: Mikkoau, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.