On August 25, 1991, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced in the comp.os.minix newsgroup the creation of a working prototype of a new Linux operating system after five months of development. The completion of ports of bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40 was noted in the announcement. The first public release of the Linux kernel was made on September 17th, with the kernel 0.0.1 having a compressed size of 62 KB and containing approximately 10 thousand lines of source code. Today, the modern Linux kernel has about 44 million lines of code.
The Linux kernel was inspired by the MINIX operating system, which Torvalds did not like due to its limited license. Subsequently, there were accusations of code copying between MINIX and Linux, which were refuted by Andrew Tanenbaum, the creator of MINIX. A detailed comparison showed only four minor matches of code blocks between the two systems due to POSIX and ANSI C requirements.
Initially named “Freax” from “free,” “freak,” and X (Unix), Linus changed the name to “Linux” thanks to Ari Lemmke, who posted the kernel on the university’s FTP server as “linux.” The Linux trademark was initially held by William Della Croce, who later transferred all rights to Torvalds. The official mascot, Tux the penguin, was selected through a competition in 1996, with the name Tux standing for Torvalds UniX.
Growth dynamics of the Linux kernel code base in terms of the number of lines of source code include milestones such as:
- 0.0.1 – September 1991, 10 thousand lines of code;
- 1.0.0 – March 1994, 176 thousand lines of code;
- 1.2.0 – March 1995, 311 thousand lines of code;
- 2.0.0 – June 1996, 778 thousand lines of code;
- 2.2.0 – January 1999, 1.8 million lines of code;
- 2.4.0 – January 2001, 3.4 million lines of code;
- 2.6.0 – December 2003, 5.9 million lines of code;
- 2.6.28 – December 2008,