Linus Torvalds announces Linux (1991)
Linus Torvalds announced the creation of a new operating system in 1991, which he described as a hobby project. He sought feedback from users of Minix to understand their preferences and dislikes. The operating system, which would be free of Minix code, was intended for 386 and 486 AT clones and included features like a multi-threaded file system.
- ▪Linus Torvalds announced his new operating system in a post to the Minix user community.
- ▪He requested feedback on features that users would like to see in the new OS.
- ▪The operating system is designed for 386 and 486 AT clones and is free of any Minix code.
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| Original publisher | Archive |
| Canonical URL | https://web.archive.org/web/20100104211620/http://www.linux.org/people/linus_post.html |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 06:31:22 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T06:49:57.540Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T06:49:57.540Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rDO40f0_9rpH |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Linus Torvalds announces Linux If you'd like to find out about how Linus created Linux, you can read his autobiography, Just For Fun from HarperCollins, available at Amazon Linus in 1991 From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary: small poll for my new operating system Message-ID: <[email protected]> Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Archive.