Linus Torvalds tells The Reg how Linux evolved from solo act • The Register
Linus Torvalds tells The Reg how Linux evolved from solo act • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/linus_torvalds_and_friends/
Publish Date: 2026-02-18 04:34:00
Source Domain: www.theregister.com
If you know anything about Linux’s history, you’ll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” We know that the “hobby” operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world.
Did you ever wonder, though, how it went from being one person’s project to being a group effort? I knew most of the story because I’d been using Linux since 1993. But I thought I’d ask Linus, and some of the early Linux developers.
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It all began when Torvalds and his friend Lars Wirzenius met at the University of Helsinki. They began tinkering with PCs; computer games (Prince of Persia); social networking, which in those days was Usenet; and Unix.
In the spring and summer of 1991, Torvalds hacked on a simple Unix‑like kernel for his 386 PC. He wanted to learn about operating systems, dial into the local Usenet server, and build a more capable operating system than Minix, an academic Unix clone.
Torvalds told The Register: “The ‘good old days’ really aren’t as rose-colored as some people like to think they were.” After a few months of work, he released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02. on October 5, 1991, on an FTP server with about 10,000 lines of code. Linux made its first appearance thanks to Torvalds’ friend, Ari Lemmke, who set up the first servers at nic.funet.fi in Finland.
At this point, Torvalds wanted to call Linux “Freax,” a mashup of “free,” “freak,” and “x” to evoke a Unix‑like system. When he uploaded the code to the FUNET FTP server, though, Lemmke disliked “Freax” and named the project directory as “Linux” instead, and that name stuck.
The audience was anyone…
