26/08/2026
Linux is 35! All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers run it. More than three billion Android devices run it. It started 12,784 days ago tonight, described by its own author as just a hobby that would never be big.
That description is on the record. I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU). The message was not an announcement, it was a poll, with a question mark in the subject line and a summary that read: small poll for my new operating system. The list of things it could not do was longer than the list of things it could: not portable, 386 only, probably never anything but AT hard disks.
Version 0.01 went up on an FTP server three weeks later, on 17 September 1991, with no announcement at all. It was 10,239 lines of code. It could not even run on its own yet, because it still needed Minix to compile.
It was nearly not called Linux. The name in the source was Freax, from free, freak and the x of Unix. Ari Lemmke, one of the admins of that FTP server at Helsinki University of Technology, thought that was terrible and created a directory called linux instead. The name stuck because it was never changed back.
The penguin arrived in May 1996, after an argument on the mailing list about what the logo should be. Torvalds settled it himself: "I like penguins." Then he copied his favourite penguin picture to an ftp site so everyone could see what he meant. Larry Ewing drew the bird in GIMP, developer James Hughes suggested calling it Tux, and a hand-drawn penguin became the face of the most widely deployed operating system there is.
That penguin now sits on this.
The TOP500 list ranks the fastest supercomputers in the world. Linux has held all 500 places since November 2017, eighteen lists in a row.
One of those 500 sits at Lawrence Livermore. El Capitan: more than 11,000 compute nodes, 5.4 petabytes of memory, benchmarked at 1.809 quintillion calculations per second. Its job is to certify that the American nuclear stockpile still works, without setting off a bomb to check. That question gets answered by simulation, on an operating system that shipped with a warning about hard disk support.
In April 2021 a four-pound helicopter called Ingenuity lifted off the surface of Mars, the first powered flight on another planet. It flew itself, because a signal from Earth took a quarter of an hour to arrive and nobody can hold a remote that long. Phone chip, Linux for navigation, open-source flight software from JPL. It was built for five flights over thirty days. It made 72, over almost three years.
The kernel that started at 10,239 lines is now past 40 million. It runs in billions of Android devices, in the servers behind most websites, in routers, cars, televisions, medical equipment and payment terminals. It is in the machine you are reading this on, or the one that sent it to you, and often both.
None of that was in the plan, because there was no plan. There was a question mark in a subject line, a promise not to promise anything, a name chosen by somebody else, and a hand-drawn penguin.
Open a terminal and run uname -r. What comes back is the direct descendant of those 10,239 lines, and the original email is still sitting in the comp.os.minix archives if you want to read it yourself.
That terminal is also where the work happens. The tools in my course all run on this thing: nmap, Wireshark, Metasploit, the shell itself. Learning Linux is not the step before hacking, it is the same step.
My Ethical Hacking Complete Course Zero to Expert takes you there step by step:
reconnaissance, scanning, exploitation and traffic analysis,
hands-on, from your first day with no Linux or hacking background.
→ https://www.udemy.com/course/ethical-hacking-complete-course-zero-to-expert/?couponCode=MISSION
Hacking is not a hobby but a way of life. 🎯
Research & writing: Jolanda de Koff | HackingPassion.com
Sharing is fine. Copying without credit is not.
