The majority of modern computers utilize different versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system (OS), but Microsoft's way to victory was not easy, as a lot of operating systems were available in the eighties, including various versions of DOS, OS/2 and so on. Linux, the main ?alternative?operating system of today, was born in the early nineties and in the beginning no one thought that it would become relatively big. A group of enthusiasts led by Linus Torvalds spent some time creating the barebone of Linux back in 1991 and almost fifteen years later, their efforts are definitely not forgotten: Linux is still free and has, in fact, become much better.

?Linus himself didn't believe that his creation was going to be big enough to change computing forever. Linux version 0.01 was released by mid September 1991, and was put on the net. Enthusiasm gathered around this new kid on the block, and codes were downloaded, tested, tweaked, and returned to Linus. By December came version 0.10. Still Linux was little more than in skeletal form. It had only support for AT hard disks, had no login (booted directly to bash). Version 0.11 was much better with support for multilingual keyboards, floppy disk drivers, support for VGA, EGA, Hercules etc. The version numbers went directly from 0.12 to 0.95 and 0.96 and so on. Soon the code went worldwide via ftp sites at Finland and elsewhere,?writes The Tech Zone.

• The Tech Zone: The History Of Linux.