How a bored student changed the world.
On August 25th 1991, a 21 year old Finnish student named Linus Torvalds posted a message to a Minix forum, a different flavour of Unix. He said that he is starting his own little home kernal project, and little did he know, it was about to become one of the most popular operating systems on earth.
He was wrong.
Linus released Linux under an open source license on https://kernel.org/ and github. Anyone in the community can go and edit the code, which is how the Linux kernel grew from a small 10k lines by Linus to a massive 40 million by Linus and thousands of people in the community.
One day Linus got bitten by a pengiun, and he thought they were cool, so he made the linux mascot a pengiun.
Companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook quietly built their entire enterprise on top of linux, before most of the world even knew linux existed.
Google's Android operating system launched — built directly on top of the Linux kernel. Overnight, Linux was in the pocket of billions of people who had never heard of it.
Linux powers the International Space Station, the world's fastest supercomputers, most of the internet, and nearly every Android device on earth. Not bad for a hobby project.