Also very interesting is the discussion between Torvalds and Tanenbaum (the creator of Minix) with the funny title "LINUX is obsolete" in 1992:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.minix/wlhw16...

My favorite gem from that link is this quote (Linus signs a post where he apologizes for flaming Tanenbaum)

'Linus "my first, and hopefully last flamefest" Torvalds'

Oh how hopeful we are when young ;)

Haha I thought the same thing. This read is gold just for insight in to his sense of diplomacy during the early days.

Neat thread. ast to Linus's response to ast's initial post:

> Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.

It's interesting how computer science intellectuals of this era "knew" that "superior" chipsets would draw everyone to things like Sun's Sparcstation instead of plain ol' IBM x86 machines. Most interesting is being able to read their assertions, verbatim, from old Usenet posts hosted on a (presumably Linux) server farm "in the cloud" from a laptop running Linux x86-64 machine not physically connected to a network in any fashion--forget the "WD ethernet card!"

Are there any good write-ups out there on how linux grew in popularity in the very beginning?

I've seen this a few times before. Just goes to show you, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". It's better to be the 'first' with a product than to be the 'best' and release a little later. Of course nowadays if he posted something like that on any social media site, he would be slammed with 99% negative comments, insulted by too many trolls to count, and in general, simply ignored. Yes, I'm cynical. Go ahead and attack me for that. You know you want to.

My colleague on Opensource.com wrote an excellent summary of Linux's history: http://opensource.com/life/15/8/happy-24th-birthday-linux-ke...