Linux came into existence in 1991 when Linus Torvalds after being frustrated with the licensing issues of Minix (an Unix-based operating system)started to write his own code. … The code which he wrote later became the Linux kernel.

How was Linux started?

Linux, computer operating system created in the early 1990s by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). While still a student at the University of Helsinki, Torvalds started developing Linux to create a system similar to MINIX, a UNIX operating system.

What was the first Linux?

On October 5, 1991, Linus announced the first “official” version of Linux, version 0.02. At this point, Linus was able to run bash (the GNU Bourne Again Shell) and gcc (the GNU C compiler), but not much else was working. Again, this was intended as a hacker’s system.