Brief History Of Linux (#20) Linux is born

Linus' superhuman programming talent produced, within a year, a full operating system that rivaled Minix. The first official announcement on comp.os.minix came October 5th, in which Linus wrote these famous words:

Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Do you want to cut your teeth on an operating system that will achieve world domination within 15 years? Want to get rich quick by the end of the century by taking money from hordes of venture capitalists and clueless Wall Street suits? Need to get even with Bill Gates but don't know what to do except throw cream pies at him? Then this post might just be for you :-)

Linux (which was known as "Lindows", "Freax", and "Billsux" for short periods in 1991) hit the bigtime on January 5, 1992 (exactly one year after Linus wasn't hit by a bus) when version 0.12 was released under the GNU GPL. Linus called his creation a "better Minix than Minix"; the famous Linus vs. Tanenbaum flamewar erupted soon thereafter on January 29th and injured several Usenet bystanders.

"tool"

Definition: instrument used to shape, form, finish

Synonyms: apparatus, appliance, contraption, contrivance, device, engine, gadget, gizmo, implement, instrument, job, machine, means, mechanism, utensil, weapon, whatchamacallit

Credit: thesaurus.com

Tools represent Humanity's greatest achievement -- the desire and the ability to rise above the flesh, to enable each of us to create whatever we imagine. From the ealiest stick, digging out grubs from a fallen tree ... to the latest hand-held, head-held, or mentally-directed device, tools allow us to devise, revise, ruminate, communicate, work and play.

The following sampling are tools developed upon need for one purpose or another...