On September 27, 1983, MIT programmer Richard Stallman posted a message to the Usenet groups net.unix-wizards and net.usoft announcing the GNU Project, a plan to write a complete Unix-compatible operating system and give it away to anyone who wanted it. The name was a recursive joke: GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.”
The announcement asked computer makers and individual programmers to donate machines, money, code and time. Actual work started in January 1984. Over the next few years Stallman laid out his ideas in the GNU Manifesto, and the Free Software Foundation was set up to back the effort. By the late 1980s the project had produced many of the tools a Unix-like system needs, including GNU Emacs, the GCC compiler and replacements for standard utilities such as ls, grep and make.
The one big missing piece was a kernel. That gap closed in 1991, when Linus Torvalds released Linux; he later licensed it under GNU’s own General Public License. Put the GNU tools and the Linux kernel together and you had a fully free operating system. That pairing now runs most of the world’s servers, supercomputers and, by way of Android, billions of phones. It’s why you’ll still hear people insist on calling it “GNU/Linux.”
Source: GNU.org – Initial Announcement, Wikipedia – GNU Project
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
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