On 25 August 1991 is when Linus Torvalds in Helsinki announced his “free operating system” as a hobby that he had been developing since April. The initial release had GCC 1.40 and Bash 1.08 ported. The work wasn’t originally known as Linux but originally was called Freax before being renamed to Linux. While most Phoronix readers have likely already seen that classic email many times, for those that haven’t you can see the original posting to comp.os.minix. Happy birthday Linux!
Twenty-three years later, we’re now approaching the feature-rich Linux 3.17 kernel.