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> I do not expect ANYTHING to come from this project. I do not expect to finish this project. And I do expect that - if nobody will follow me into helping the project - the project will be dead quite soon. I do not expect this project to become the dominant browser that will topple all the big players in the market.

This sounds like Linus' original announcement of Linux on comp.os.minix:

> 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). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus (torvalds [at] kruuna.helsinki.fi) PS. Yes – it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(. —Linus Torvalds



> it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks

*installs Linux on literal spacecraft*

You never know where a project will go. And in a way it doesn't matter, if you're doing it for your own reasons.


Also busy installing Linux on a spacecraft. Turns out you don't need things to be perfect, just very well documented and easy to adapt to random people's needs. Not commercialized to all fuck helps too.


Crazy to read his announcement all those years ago, and yet, here we are. Linus is still spearheading the project diligently (which is also crazy to me), and now it's the backbone OS of the internet. Almost every server room of almost every large corporation is comprised mainly of servers running Linux (or a custom internal derivative).


> Almost every server room of almost every large corporation is comprised mainly of servers running Linux

Even at Microsoft. Truly incredible.




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