March 2004

A Penguin Ten Years Old

by Peter H. Salus

A few weeks ago, I pointed to August 1969 as the "birthmonth" of UNIX. A few days after that birth, the ARPAnet (soon to become the Internet) was born. And, on 28 December 1969, Linus Torvalds was born.

Murray Hill, NJ
Los Angeles, CA
Helsinki, FI

In some future article, I'll talk about just how each step grew from the earlier one(s). But right now I'd like to look at what Linus wrought and celebrate it.

Because Linus was truly dependent upon the Internet and (specifically) the comp.os.minix newsgroup, we can date events far more accurately than in earlier decades. Thus, we know that Linus put what we would now call Linux 0.01 on the University of Helsinki ftp site on 17 September 1991. "No more than one or two people ever checked it out," he said.

The following January there was discernible growth in the Linux community, leading (I think) to the attack on Linux by Andy Tanenbaum on 29 January 1992. Perhaps more important, in the spring Orest Zborowski ported the X window system to Linux.

The number of Linux users continued to grow, as did the versions of the software. .01 was 63KB compressed. Only a few weeks later, Linus posted .02 on 5 October. On 19 December, v.11 was posted; and on 5 January 1992, v.12 —108KB compressed — appeared. On 7 March, there was v.95, and on 25 May 1992, v.96 (with support for X and taking up 174KB compressed).

It was barely a year since Linus' first posting, but in 1992 SuSE was formed; in February Bruce Perens released MCC Linux, and on December 8 Yggdrasil alpha was released.

1993 began with Yggdrasil beta's release (18 February) and went on to Red Hat's being set up by Mark Ewing. August 1993 brought us Debian (from Debbie and Ian Murdoch).