Linux will be twenty years old this summer. On August 26, 1991 Linus Torvalds posted a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup that started like this.
"Hello everybody out there using minix. 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. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
What resulted has been truly astounding. We congratulate Linus Torvald, the Linux Foundation and the entire Linux community for their contributions to computer science and the world.
I am not sure when we began to use Linux here at UMBC. Most of the machines running Unix in our labs in the 1990s were from Sun or SGI, so we used Solaris and Irix. Sometime in the early 2000s we started replacing the SGIs with Intel boxes and switched to Linux.
The Linux Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary and commissioned this nicely done video that tells the story of Linux in under four minutes.
Visit our Web site if the video is not visible above.
Check out their Linux 20th Celebration page for more information about Linux, its history and how pervasive it has become.