Linus' superhuman programming talent produced, within a year, a full
operating system that rivaled Minix. The first official announcement on
comp.os.minix came October 5th, in which Linus wrote these famous words:
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Do you want to cut your teeth on an operating
system that will achieve world domination within 15 years? Want to get
rich quick by the end of the century by taking money from hordes of
venture capitalists and clueless Wall Street suits? Need to get even
with Bill Gates but don't know what to do except throw cream pies at
him? Then this post might just be for you :-)
Linux (which was known as "Lindows", "Freax", and "Billsux" for short
periods in 1991) hit the bigtime on January 5, 1992 (exactly one year
after Linus wasn't hit by a bus) when version 0.12 was released under the
GNU GPL. Linus called his creation a "better Minix than Minix"; the famous
Linus vs. Tanenbaum flamewar erupted soon thereafter on January 29th and
injured several Usenet bystanders.
What Did Santa Claus Bring You In 1999? (#1)
LINUS TORVALDS Santa didn't bring me anything, but Tim O'Reilly just gave
me a large sum of money to publish my new book, "Linus Torvalds' Official
Guide To Receiving Fame, Fortune, and Hot Babes By Producing Your Own
Unix-Like Operating System In Only 10 Years"....
