Linus Torvalds Recognizes Linux's 'True' 30th Anniversary Date

While it’s been argued that Linux has four different "birthdays," last Friday saw the 30th anniversary of Linux’s very, very first release — version 0.01.

That special first release “was never publicly announced, and I only emailed a handful of people in private about the upload,” Torvalds remembered on the Linux kernel mailing list. He no longer has copies of those announcement emails, “so there’s no real record of that. The only record of the date is in the Linux-0.01 tar-file itself, I suspect.”“Alas, the dates in that tar-file are for the last modification dates, not the actual creation of the tar-file,” Torvalds wrote, “but it does seem to have happened around 7:30pm (Finnish time), so the exact anniversary was technically a couple of hours ago.”

So when the exact moment arrived for its 30th anniversary, Torvalds couldn’t resist sharing the moment on the Linux kernel mailing list.

“Just thought I’d mention it, since while unannounced, in many ways this is the true 30th anniversary date of the actual code.”

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