When Linus Torvalds first announced his new operating system on August 25, 1991, he played it down completely. His comp.os.minix post said he was “doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” The original message is preserved in the CMU collection of early Linux history.
The phrase “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu” is now quoted constantly, because it turned out to be so wrong. Linux became one of the most important pieces of software ever written, running most of the world’s servers and, through Android, most of its phones.
The line is also a small window into the moment: in 1991 the ambitious, “professional” free operating system everyone was waiting for was the GNU project, and a 21-year-old student in Helsinki measured his own weekend kernel against it and assumed his would never matter as much.