Birthday of Linux

Story: GNU/Linux: An Amazing StoryTotal Replies: 1
Author Content
grouch

Mar 20, 2006
1:54 AM EDT
Great story, Adelstein! I like the disheveled scientist part; RMS needed that last piece of the puzzle but it kept slipping away. Along comes a kid meddling with the experiment, drops in a different sort of piece and the darn thing works. It's not what was intended (macro vs. micro), but there's no denying the success.

As pointed out in the article, the first release (0.01) was on September 17, 1991. The official birthday of Linux is set at August 25, 1991.

http://www.linux10.org/history/ "That was the date in 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted an article in comp.os.minix saying his new experimental kernel was running bash and gcc, and he was going to post the source code soon."

Scroll 'way down to the bottom of http://edge-op.org/files/kernel-releases.html and you'll see that it was 1992-12-08 before linux-0.11 was released. The egg took a while to hatch.

I think it would be fascinating to see some kind of line graph of kernel releases over time, a more generalized timeline plotting major events (something like http://lwn.net/Articles/163414/ only graphical and with fewer details), combined with this story.

Does anybody know of such graphics out there? Who knows, it might grow to the depth and detail of Eric Levenez' Unix Timeline http://www.levenez.com/unix/

grouch

Mar 20, 2006
2:20 AM EDT
(Tried to edit the above instead of replying to my own post, but it kinda munged up so I aborted the edit).

Found this text timeline by Jorn Barger: http://www.robotwisdom.com/linux/timeline.html

Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]

Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!