On 17 September 1991, Torvalds released the first version of the Linux kernel
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On 17 September 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki, uploaded to ftp.funet.fi — the FTP server of the Finnish University and Research Network (FUNET) — the first version of the Linux kernel, 0.01. It could not be run: the code was compiled and tested only under Minix, meaning the system itself could not yet work without someone else's OS.
He had spoken about the idea earlier — on 25 August 1991, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix. The future system was described there as a "(free) operating system… just a hobby" that was unlikely to become "big and professional like GNU"; the discussion concerned clones of the 386(486) AT. Work had been underway since April, and by that point the author had already ported bash and gcc.
The first official release was version 0.02 — Torvalds presented it on 5 October 1991. By his account, it had reached a stage where it was already usable, though not for every task: bash, gcc, gnu-make, gnu-sed and compress all ran successfully under it.
After that, things moved quickly. In December 1991, version 0.11 compiled on itself for the first time — Linux had become self-hosted. In January 1992, with the release of 0.12, the author replaced his own license with the GNU GPL v2: the previous version did not allow commercial distribution, whereas the GPL did; it came into force on 1 February 1992.
Timing played a part as well. By then the GNU project had assembled most of the components of a free replacement for UNIX, but its own kernel, GNU Hurd, remained unfinished — and the project adopted the Linux kernel. Torvalds himself labelled it with major version 0, emphasizing that it was not yet intended for general use.
Today the scale is different: the Linux kernel underpins Android and most mobile devices, and web servers and all 500 of the world's most powerful supercomputers run on it. But it all began with a file that could not even be run.
Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.
Source: en.wikipedia.org ↗