How a Finnish Student's 1991 Hobby Kernel Became the Backbone of Modern Computing

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The Linux kernel, ranked #47 on a list of products that changed the world, now underpins nearly every Android smartphone and most of the world's top web servers and supercomputers. Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old University of Helsinki student, began writing it in 1991 on a personal computer because he could not afford commercial UNIX and found the educational MINIX system's licensing restrictive. He first announced the project in August 1991 as a small hobby effort, and its initial version contained about 10,000 lines of code. Today the kernel exceeds 35 million lines, developed by tens of thousands of contributors from competing technology companies. Its success is attributed to open, early release practices and the GPL v2 license, which required modifications to be shared and encouraged rival firms to collaborate on a single shared kernel.

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