The student, Linus Torvalds, posted his homegrown variant of the popular Unix computer operating system on an Internet bulletin board and asked for a review. It was the start of what he would call Linux. Torvalds attracted about 10 developers who agreed to help develop code and to freely share any changes they made to the operating system. Nine years later, this shared code remains Linux's defining feature. It was an ambitious project for Torvalds, given an operating system's importance and the fact that nearly halfway around the globe a competing effort, with a much different method of product development, was well underway at the billion-dollar powerhouse called Microsoft.
Operating systems are the brains of a computer or computer system.
They comprise the underlying operations that run such applications as e-mail or Word. Your desktop computer might run operating systems such as the desktop version of Windows 2000 or Windows 98. A bigger computer, your server, which runs your network, also has an operating system, such as Unix, Windows NT, the server version of Windows 2000 and Novell's NetWare. Operating systems communicate with each other, such as when your desktop computer tells the server to send your e-mail. Corporate customers are beginning to see Linux as an inexpensive fit for applications that run on their servers, especially those that run web sites, databases and e-mail systems.