Linux in 1991: How a Student Project Came to Run the Web
In August 1991 a Finnish student announced a free operating system as a hobby. Read how Linus Torvalds's Linux kernel came to power servers, phones and hosting.
On 25 August 1991, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds, posted a message to a Usenet newsgroup about Minix. He explained that he was building a free operating system as a hobby, and he asked what features people would like. He described it as nothing big or professional. Three decades later, the kernel he started is the foundation of most web servers, all Android phones and the majority of the world's supercomputers.
What came before
To understand why Linux mattered, you need to know the situation in 1991. Unix, created at Bell Labs from 1969 onward, was the preferred operating system for serious computing, but it was owned by AT&T and licensed commercially, with several competing versions. Personal computers ran DOS and early Windows. Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix, a small teaching version of Unix, was inexpensive and widely used in universities, but its licence restricted how freely it could be changed and shared.
Meanwhile the GNU project, started by Richard Stallman in 1983, had produced many Unix-compatible tools, such as a compiler and a shell, but still lacked a finished kernel.
The kernel
Torvalds had bought a PC with an Intel 386 processor and wanted a Unix-like system that used its features properly. He began writing a kernel, the core part of an operating system that manages the processor, memory and devices. Version 0.01 was made available in September 1991. A key decision came in 1992: Torvalds released the kernel under the GNU General Public License, which required that anyone who distributed modified versions also had to share the source code.
The combination turned out to be a complete system. The GNU tools supplied the compiler and the commands, and the Linux kernel supplied what was missing. This is why some people prefer the name GNU/Linux. Others use Linux for the kernel and the whole family of systems built around it.
Why the project grew
- Open development. Torvalds accepted patches from anyone and credited contributors, and a large community formed around the mailing list.
- Free of charge. Universities, start-ups and hobbyists could use it without licence fees.
- Distributions. Projects such as Slackware, Debian (1993), Red Hat and later Ubuntu packaged the kernel with software and installers.
- Hardware support. Contributors added drivers for a wide range of devices.
- The GPL. Companies could build on it safely, knowing that improvements would flow back.
Linux meets the web
The kernel arrived just as the web began to grow. A Linux server running Apache, MySQL and PHP could be assembled from free components on inexpensive hardware, which is why the LAMP stack became so common. Hosting companies could run thousands of customers on commodity machines without paying per-server licence fees. Large technology companies adopted it for similar reasons, and by the 2000s major corporations such as IBM were investing in Linux. Google's early infrastructure ran on Linux machines built from inexpensive parts.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1991 | Torvalds announces the project; version 0.01 |
| 1992 | Kernel released under the GPL |
| 1996 | Version 2.0, with multiprocessor support; the penguin mascot Tux is chosen |
| 2005 | Torvalds creates Git, now the most widely used version control system, to manage kernel development |
| 2008 | Android, built on the Linux kernel, appears on phones |
Git: a side effect
When the kernel project lost access to the proprietary version control system it had been using, Torvalds wrote a replacement in a matter of weeks in 2005. Git became the standard tool for developers and the base for services such as GitHub. It is an example of an open-source project spawning another that became just as important.
Common questions
Is Linux an operating system or a kernel?
Strictly, Linux is the kernel. What people install is a distribution, which combines the kernel with system tools, libraries and applications.
Which distribution do servers use?
Several are common on servers, including Debian, Ubuntu, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. They differ in release schedules and package management, not in the basic way they work.
How Linux is developed
The kernel is developed in the open, with a structure that has changed little. Thousands of developers, many employed by companies that rely on Linux, submit patches. Subsystem maintainers review them, and Torvalds and a small group of senior maintainers decide what goes into each release. New versions appear every nine to ten weeks or so, and certain versions are designated for long-term support so that distributions and hosting providers can run them for years while receiving security fixes. This steady, predictable release rhythm is one reason why enterprises came to trust the system.
For a hosting customer, the practical effect is that security fixes for the kernel reach servers quickly when the provider keeps up with updates, and that the same fixes are available to everybody at the same time.
The lesson for site owners
Linux explains why hosting is affordable and why you can choose between many providers without being locked into one vendor's technology. Most hosting plans, including those from Zebra Hosting, run on Linux servers, and you manage your site through the Plesk control panel without needing to use the command line. If you want to go further and administer your own server, a VPS gives you full access, and the knowledgebase covers common tasks.
