On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup under the subject “What would you like to see most in minix?” The message, sent from torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI at the University of Helsinki and dated 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT, opened: “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.”
Torvalds explained that the project “has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready,” and that he had “currently ported bash (1.08) an gcc (1.40), and things seem to work.” He asked the newsgroup what features people would most want, framing the whole effort as a personal experiment rather than a serious operating system.
The understated tone of the post is the reason it is remembered. The “just a hobby” line, archived in the CMU collection of early Linux history, became one of the most quoted understatements in computing, because the hobby kernel went on to run a large share of the world’s computers.
The post also placed Linux in direct conversation with the systems around it: it was addressed to MINIX users, defined against the GNU project, and within months would draw Andrew Tanenbaum’s “LINUX is obsolete” critique.