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With Dell now offering it pre-installed and most of your favorite sites powered by it, it's easy to forget that Linux as we know it is less than thirteen years old.
In September of 1991 Linus Torvalds e-mailed the comp.os.minix Usenet group to say: "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."
Kernel Trap recently had a [nice overview of Linus' early thoughts on the kernel][1] and its development, some of which become quite funny in light of the actual development of Linux.
Originally Linus didn't think the kernel would port from the original 32-bit i386 chip architecture. And while that is the way Linux 1.0 shipped, by the time 1.2 arrived just under a year later, it had already been ported to 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit SPARC, and the 64-bit Alpha.
Linus was also pretty adamant that Linux was nothing more than a hobby and probably wouldn't impress many people.
Of course a quick push of the fast-forward button and you get to today where consumer-friendly distributions of Linux are shipping pre-installed on Dell machines.
A crazy condensed history to give you a little perspective on a monday morning.
[1]: http://kerneltrap.org/node/14002
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