Left: Courtesy of Pratul K. Agarwal; Right: Courtesy of High Performance Computing Facility, University of Puerto Rico
Users no longer need remember arcane command-line incantations with Linux; the OS hides its complexities beneath a snazzy user interface. Here, Linux versions of ImageJ, an image manipulation suite (top) and PyMOL, a biomolecular structure visualizer (left) are shown.
On August 25, 1991, a student named Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki posted an innocuous message to an Internet bulletin board. "Hello everybody out there using minix," he wrote on the comp.os.minix newsgroup. "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." Minix was a commercial UNIX product, and Torvalds, who was building a free variant of it, was taking feature requests.
Thirteen years later Torvalds' project, called Linux ("Linus' Minix"), has become a wildly popular alternative to Windows and Mac ...
