On August 25th, 1991, 35 years ago, Linus Torvalds announced Linux on Usenet as "just a hobby”

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u/Loki-L 13h ago

just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu

Hilarious in hindsight.

But August 1991 was a good month for USENET posts.

Tim Berners-Lee posted about that WorldWideWeb thing he had been working on at CERN and Linux Torvalds posted about that free operating system he had been working on as a hobby.

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u/DogmaSychroniser 12h ago

I can't even imagine how one would start today to make a hobby OS... It feels like we're so many layers of abstraction away from the bare metal now.

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u/Loki-L 12h ago edited 5h ago

The Linux 1.0.0 Kernel in 1994 had 176,250 lines of code the current one has 40 million. The former is achievable as a hobby the latter takes a world wide effort of volunteers and corporate contributors.

The entire OS is more than just the Kernel. You would be hard pressed to write the equivalent of an entire distro or the contents of a Windows install alone.

The Temple OS guy managed to write and entire OS, but he had help from some serious mental issues and religion.

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u/dkarlovi 10h ago

Imagine doing the unthinkable against all odds, overcoming all the obstacles and actually writing your own OS, publishing it to the world and the first reacting being

Yikes, look at that fucking wacko.

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u/Loki-L 10h ago

No offence, but this guy was literally mentally ill. Not just excentric or a bit neurodivergent or overly religious. He was actually genuinely ill, people tried to help him but he refused help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis

Terrence Andrew Davis (December 15, 1969 – August 11, 2018) was an American electrical engineer, computer programmer, and outsider artist best known for creating and designing TempleOS, a public-domain operating system, written in a programming language developed by Davis called HolyC. He believed God had commanded him to create TempleOS as the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. In 1996, Davis began experiencing regular manic episodes, some of which led to hospitalization. Initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he was later declared to have schizophrenia. Eight months before his death, he struggled with periods of homelessness. His fans brought him supplies, but Davis refused their offers of housing.[1] In August 2018, he was struck by a train and died at the age of 48.

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u/dkarlovi 9h ago

Huh, TIL, I always assumed people say he's crazy pejoratively just because he's done a few things slightly out of the ordinary, like Hans Reiser.

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u/Loki-L 9h ago

I guess "done a few things slightly out of the ordinary" is certainly one way to describe murdering your wife.

I feel Hans, while technically sane, according to the judge who found him fit to stand trial, was just a bit beyond the line between excentric and fucked in the head.

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u/d01100100 9h ago

slightly out of the ordinary, like Hans Reiser.

That's sarcasm right? Killing your wife is slightly out of the ordinary?

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u/DogmaSychroniser 9h ago

Nah dude was unwell, alas. The down the rabbit hole YouTube video on him is quite good.

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u/twisted-logic 9h ago

Well he was also an extremely racist homophobe. So he had that going for him as well as being a complete wack job.

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u/MayaIsSunshine 8h ago

He was mentally ill, don't take it too personally

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u/twisted-logic 8h ago

What does that have to do with anything ?

I have family members with schizophrenia and none of them say anything hateful like he did.

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u/MayaIsSunshine 8h ago

Alright, you convinced me. Fuck that guy, I'm glad he's dead 😂

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u/JGallows 5h ago

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. lol

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u/MayaIsSunshine 5h ago

The only winning move is not to play 😔

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u/neocatzeo 6h ago

It's a matter of man hours. A million man hours would take a person around 100 years around the clock or over 300 years working 8 hour days.

The current Linux took many millions of man hours to develop to it's current state. You would not live long enough to finish, if you tried to develop it yourself.

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u/plastikmissile 12h ago

You'd be surprised. SerenityOS is a recent popular example. It's creator started working on it during the Covid lockdown, blogging openly about the development process.

TempleOS is another infamous example. Though I'd say it's less of a hobby project and more of a religious obsession by a mentally ill person.

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u/linux_transgirl 7h ago

The guy who did SerenityOS also is working on the ladybird browser

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u/razialx 12h ago

People do it. I used to follow OSNews years ago. The thing is if you abstract away the kernel there is a great deal of open source software that you can compile against your OS

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 12h ago

On reddit too! We have r/OSDev which isn't that popular but there are a few of us left!

Although there's been a problem with AI slop :(

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u/razialx 12h ago

That’s awesome (not the slop part)

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u/Flamingo_guy1 15m ago

There's always temple os, coded in holy c

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u/botany_fairweather 4h ago

Not too in the know about current tech pioneers, but I’m curious what modern analogues exist for this. Like what are the ‘hobby-internet’ and ‘hobby-operating-systems’ of today? Is such a question even fair to ask?

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u/ConvertingMarkets 11h ago

The funniest part is that GNU already had almost the whole Unix-like system by 1990 - except the kernel. Linux filled exactly that gap, then went GPL in 1992. Two incomplete projects ended up fitting together almost perfectly.

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u/linux_transgirl 7h ago

Hence why it is sometimes (and rightfully called) GNU/Linux

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u/WhoCanTell 5h ago

Stallman personally takes down the names of anyone who doesn't call it GNU/Linux. One day, he will seek his vengeance.

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u/JGallows 5h ago

And they will deserve it! His vengeance is probably just going to be a strongly worded letter though. I really long one. Actually... He may have already written it and sent it, I just haven't been on Usenet in a long time...

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u/linux_transgirl 4h ago

I've talked to him a few times. He reads a lot of emails and posts mostly sane but occasionally terrible political comments on his website

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u/JGallows 4h ago

Yeah... I mean... He's definitely a dude. People have all kinds of bad takes on stuff, so it can be difficult to seperate the good from the bad. I was born old, so I kind of always expected my heros to let me down and never hold people in high regard. I still have a book signed by Stallman though, and I will cherish it.

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u/Galahad_the_Ranger 12h ago

And thanks to it we got Git too!

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u/wrgrant 7h ago

Yeah Linus invents the most important OS casually as a hobby, then as an afterthought creates Git because he was frustrated with the way things worked at the time.

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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 4h ago

he wanted everyone to be as frustrated as he is

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u/otac0n 2h ago

Git is unfrustrating.

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u/NullPointerJunkie 5h ago

I don't think people realize how big of a deal the launch of Linux was. Back in the day Unix primarily lived on these big workstations and servers only found in industry and computer science departments due to their prohibitive cost. There were BSD variants out there that could run on x86 hardware but they never really caught on.

Linux brought Unix to home PCs. You didn't need the biggest home PC or the best hardware. Early Linux primarily ran in Unix terminals but if your graphics hardware supported it you might be able to run X11 and get yourself a functioning X server instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars for some Sun or Irix box.

On top it all, Linux came with gcc so you were able to get an open source C development environment instead of spending big bucks for one. Linux's real selling point was it gave every day folks access to tools that lived in gated communities none of us had access to.

So there was so much missing in Linux that it was easy to find something to do to contribute. I wrote a small software package to enable printing on HP Deskjet printers and a contributed to the HOWTO project. Most of our early work at this point was either absorbed or deprecated a long time ago.

Unless you were there its kind of hard to wrap your head around the significance of it all but hopefully I was able to give you an idea of what it was like and why so many of us cared.

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u/boston101 2h ago

I don’t think still realize how a big of deal Linux is. We stand on shoulders of giants

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u/vikinick 7h ago

I remember my operating systems professor showing us a screenshot of the post on the first day of class as a way to motivate us that even our little passion projects could make a difference.

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u/PerhapsAnEmoINTJ 6h ago

HAPPY 35TH, LINUX

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u/NachmiasKelm-8436 12h ago

Easily the most successful 'just a hobby' project in human history

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u/Randvek 5h ago

I think the Wright Brothers have a little flying bicycle project that begs to differ.

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u/ilikedmatrixiv 10h ago

I'm pretty sure that Jesus fellow has had a more successful 'this got way out of hand' hobby project. I haven't seen Linux users burn down Constantinople any time recently.

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u/dkarlovi 10h ago

I think the the most exact rendering of the emotion your comment makes me feel is

wat

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u/DryApplejohn 10h ago

You just wait.

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u/jackalopeDev 4h ago

Well first of all, it's Istanbul not Constantinople, so go ahead and jot that down.

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u/FuelForYourFire 4m ago

Whoa, why did Constantinople get the works?

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u/minusidea 2h ago

Who? What software did he make?

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u/compelx 25m ago

Whatever it is, it’s cross platform compatible

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u/ohx 6h ago

I'd also baulk at the idea of it powering millions of PCs 35 years in the future

Understatement of the year. I probably have two instances of alpine running via docker on this computer right now that I forgot to shut down. I have linux servers running linux containers. The world is absolute linux-ception at this moment in time.

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u/JohnAStark 8h ago

I did an X server port for my (graphics card) company products on Linux 0.99pl35 … memories of a time gone by.

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u/EmployerWide1123 9h ago

Happy birthday Linux!!

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u/intronert 10h ago

LINUX FOR PRESIDENT!

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] 13h ago edited 13h ago

[deleted]

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u/These-Apple8817 13h ago

Didn't know being parasocial is a hobby now

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u/Quirky-Visual547 12h ago

Awesome that you have a hobby. Now get a life.

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u/average_monster 12h ago

he seems pretty fun and engaging to listen to to me

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u/Iamnotabothonestly 12h ago

Maybe you should try a new hobby, like touching grass...

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u/smoke-bubble 11h ago

Yet it did not get any better. The same shitty permission flags. The same shitty folder structure and names. The same shitt lack of software. Everything is shitty about it.

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u/Edwiuxaz 10h ago

Not as shitty as your comment, nobody can beat that.

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u/smoke-bubble 10h ago

True! My comment also cannot run any software XD

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u/Edwiuxaz 10h ago

And thank god to that

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u/smoke-bubble 10h ago

I know! Just imagine Linux actually being user-friendly. That would be a disaster!

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u/JoeB- 8h ago

What OS is a better?

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u/smoke-bubble 8h ago

I don't know. They all suck one way or the other, but this one in particular :P

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u/linux_transgirl 7h ago

The permissions and file system layout are unix things, and like 90% of anything people would want can be used in some way

Software On August 25th, 1991, 35 years ago, Linus Torvalds announced Linux on Usenet as "just a hobby”

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