It's 35 years since Linus Torvalds first revealed Linux, calling it 'just a hobby' — how wrong he was
Linus Torvalds introduced Linux as a hobby project in 1991, starting development that eventually produced a 40 million-line kernel.
Thirty-five years have passed since Linus Torvalds unveiled Linux, once described by the 21-year-old Finnish computer enthusiast as "just a hobby." That initial proclamation on August 25, 1991, vastly underestimated the impact Linux would have. Torvalds unveiled the operating system as a modest personal project intended to augment his experience with Minix, an educational operating system.
His announcement, made on Usenet, expressed his desire for feedback from those familiar with Minix, given the similarities between his OS and Minix. Despite the limited expectations, Linux quickly evolved beyond its initial scope. Within a month, Torvalds released the first version, marking a transition from a private experiment to a project open for global contributions.
The project's open-source model allowed programmers worldwide to examine and modify the code, fundamentally altering the development landscape. Over time, Linux became integral to servers, embedded systems, and cloud infrastructure, with an estimated 40 million lines of code as of January 2025. The Linux kernel, which involved 2,141 developers for the 6.19 kernel cycle, is present on all 500 systems listed in the TOP500 ranking of supercomputers.
Torvalds' original modest assessment now seems quite understated when considering the global influence of the technology he created.
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