Linus wanted to run UNIX at home, but at the time the software cost $5,000, and it ran only on $10,000 workstations.
He began to work on his own UNIX clone, one that would bring all the hacking power of UNIX to a desktop PC. By early 1991, Linus had created a kernel--the heart of the operating system that works directly with the processor. He called it "Freax," a play on "free UNIX" or hacker "freaks," but when he tried to post it to the Web, the FTP site manager didn't like the implication. He named the FTP site "Linux," after the label Linus had put there for his personal use.
"I never wanted to use that name because I felt, OK, that's a little too egotistical," he remembers. "The name stuck, and right now I'm very happy I didn't call it 'Freax.' "
In October 1991, Linus announced the release of Linux .02, the first functional Linux operating system. Linus predicted the bare-bones code would appeal to shade-tree programmers who were then using a UNIX clone called Minix to tinker with their Intels.
"Do you pine for the nice days of Minix 1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" Linux queried in a Minix newsgroup. "Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can modify for your needs?"
The post reads like a taunt: Come and get it if you're man enough.
He patented Linux under the Free Software Foundation's General Public License, which made it free and available and prevented anyone from distributing it without the source code.
Back then, in 1991, UNIX couldn't run on PCs. Linux made an impact at universities, where they were teaching UNIX and using Minix.
Linux's beauty is that it can do anything UNIX can do--on a $1,000 desktop PC. What's more, anyone can download it off the Internet for programming or hacking or to convert a desktop PC into a Web server.
His first surprise came when he got emails from five other people claiming to be running their PCs on Linux. "The source code got some people really excited," says Linus. "A lot of people who used it were people who wanted to play with it." Then Linus got emails from 100 other new Linux users. "After that," he says, "I stopped being surprised."
分数有的是~可是最多就是100分 外加增加的100分还有最后采纳后加的50分。然后你还能白得到20分。最多就是270分啦。