Thirty-five years ago this week, Linus Torvalds posted a modest message to comp.os.minix about a free operating system he was building as a hobby. For me, that milestone is not just a number—it’s a mirror held up to nearly three decades of my own life, learning, and transformation. Looking back, I can still feel the electric curiosity of 1995, when I first ventured into this world alongside a dear friend and colleague. We were young, armed with assembly language, self-taught MS-DOS and Novell Netware 3.11 internals, and just enough C to be dangerous. Our institute labs were dominated by MS-DOS 6.22 and Novell Netware for LAN networking, with a few lonely machines running Windows NT 3.51. UNIX was a whispered legend to us—we had tasted fragments of its philosophy and were ravenous for more.
I still remember the day I picked up Andrew Tanenbaum’s Operating Systems: Design and Implementation—the first edition, without any accompanying floppy disks or CD-ROMs, here in India. Half the book was source code for MINIX, a UNIX clone built on elegant design principles. In my youthful hubris—I was barely 19—I thought: Why not just type this code into the lab computer, compile it, and boot it? I fired up Turbo C on a DOS machine, fingers flying over the keyboard. After a few lines, my friend peered over my shoulder, looked at the screen, then at the book, and dropped a reality bomb: “How can you even compile this? Turbo C makes DOS executables.” That moment cracked open my naïveté. We spent the next two months devouring that book, wrestling with OS concepts—some clicked, many sailed right over our heads.
Then came our first lifeline: my friend bought The Linux Starter Kit by Patrick Volkerding, which included a CD-ROM with Slackware Linux floppy-disk images. We pulled all-nighters for nearly a week, determined to get Linux onto one lab machine—an old Intel 386 clone with a paltry 4 MiB of RAM. A few months later (sometime in 1996), our institute subscribed to PC Quest magazine, whose cover CD also carried Slackware images. I admit I wasn’t fully focused at first; I was distracted by another OS on those PC Quest CDs—OS/2 Warp—and spent time toying with its installation. But my friend persisted and finally cracked it. The moment that shell prompt appeared, we knew we had crossed a threshold.
Yet lab politics and seniority restrictions soon pushed us out - our lab machines were reformatted and reinstalled with Windows NT 3.51. So I saved my paychecks, and assembled my own computer at home, piece by piece: a cabinet, keyboard, an AMD 386DX motherboard, 4 MiB RAM, a second-hand 40 MiB hard disk, and a refurbished CGA monitor. By then, my friend had bought the newer edition of Tanenbaum’s book—this time with 5¼-inch floppy disks. We installed MINIX on my home PC during more sleepless nights, and the thrill of typing commands at the shell—one by one—was intoxicating. Soon, we created Linux floppy images from our institute’s CD-ROM and repeated the ritual on my home PC. Once Linux was up and running, we realized we had entered a new universe—one teeming with hundreds of tools, utilities, and the kernel itself, all in source code, all free to read, learn, extend, and contribute. This wasn’t the shareware or freeware world of MS-DOS; this was the dawn of our understanding of Free Software.
A few months later, I bought a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem and began exploring local BBSes—most notably CiX, run by Atul Chitnis (a PC Quest columnist, and a prominent figure in the Linux communities within India). There, I found a community of Linux enthusiasts. This was India in 1996, when public internet was barely a rumor. VSNL had launched public access to the Internet in late 1995, with long waiting lists running to months for low-cost “student” accounts that offered limited remote access via telnet and FTP. Graphical web browsing was exotic and expensive. My friend, through his connections, managed to get one of those student accounts. I’ll never forget our first real internet session: dialing in, logging in to VSNL’s telnet servers, firing up Lynx at the shell prompt, and taking turns browsing the web in plain text, downloading software, articles, and manuals about GNU, Linux, and free software—until our daily usage quota ran out.
Over the next year, private ISPs emerged. I bought a MantraOnline 24-hour internet pack, which came on a CD-ROM with registration tools. For the first time, we launched Netscape Navigator on Windows and saw the World Wide Web in graphical glory. We stayed online for the entire 24 hours—and I still wince at the phone bill that shocked my parents. We downloaded newer Linux distributions and set our sights on a new frontier: the X Window System. The XFree86 project was formidable, with its cryptic xf86config tool demanding intimate hardware details—CRT monitor HSync and VSync, dot clocks, RAMDAC support on the graphics controller, and even the mouse protocol. It was overwhelming. But after endless trial and error, we got it working. The first GUI we saw was almost alien: a fine-checkered black-and-white background, flat teal icons, an analog clock, and that mesmerizing pair of eyes following the mouse (xeyes)—relics of the TWM window manager. Buttons and controls felt archaic. It took months to truly understand the X Window System. Then came the joy of configuring different window managers—fvwm, AfterStep, Window Maker, and my eventual favorite, Enlightenment (e16). I remember showing off my heavily customized desktop—futuristic, angular, alien—to friends and students, their jaws dropping at what Linux could be. Animated backgrounds from the xscreensaver collection instead of static wallpapers, the ability to run an application on a remotely connected terminal and have its graphical UI appear on my desktop—these ideas felt like sorcery at the time. I had truly become a Linux fan-boy, and I wore that badge with pride.
By late 1997, my core interest had shifted from desktop aesthetics to deep understanding. I switched jobs—from the training institute to a small antivirus company. There, I worked on MS-DOS internals, detecting new viruses, finding patterns, writing cures, and fixing bugs in their flagship antivirus products. Initially engaging, the work soon became mundane and repetitive. At home, however, I was alive—exploring the Linux ecosystem, reading code, poring over man pages and READMEs, learning configuration, internals, and design principles.
Essays by Eric S. Raymond and Richard M. Stallman ignited something in me. Their philosophies differed, sometimes substantially, but what I took from those different voices eventually distilled into a personal creed: knowledge must remain free, accessible, buildable, and extendable by all. At work, whenever I glimpsed the internals of Windows NT, the contrast was stark: where Linux invited me to look deeper, experiment, and understand, Windows remained largely behind a closed wall. I felt increasingly disillusioned. I quit shortly after.
My school-day friends were busy chasing college degrees; I was chasing something I couldn’t yet name—but somehow I knew I had to follow it.
Once I made that choice, there were suddenly no boundaries to how deep I could go—or how broadly I could explore. I dove into kernel modules, built Linux from scratch, dissected init scripts, wrote shell scripts, played with PostgreSQL and MySQL, set up Apache HTTPd, and built simple websites with HTML and CGI in Perl—all within a year. Over the next couple of years, I became known as the Linux geek in my circles. The dot-com boom was underway, and former students from my teaching days had landed in startups. They recommended me as a consultant to set up Linux, web servers, and databases for their infrastructure. What began as a hobby had graduated into a career.
I remember those days at the antivirus company, where colleagues mocked my Linux fascination. To many around me, Linux was a toy—a hobbyist’s indulgence, unfit for a serious career. But I saw its potential as something enduring, not a fleeting trend. Many of my peers understandably optimized their careers for the technologies employers wanted at that moment—Visual Basic, Visual C++, PowerBuilder, Delphi, ColdFusion, J2EE, and so on. I had, almost accidentally, made a different bet: not on a product cycle, but on an ecosystem and the principles beneath it. I charted my own course—and thirty years later, I’m still on it, still learning, improvising, deepening and broadening what I know.
I went on to work with a few startups as their free and open-source software specialist, and from 2003 onward, I returned to independent consulting across domains. Over time, I began training corporate teams in my areas of expertise, and that decision turned out to be unexpectedly transformative. Teaching well-read, seasoned engineers forced me to confront gaps I didn’t know I had; their questions, counterexamples, and fresh perspectives sharpened my understanding in ways that years of solitary tinkering never could. My autodidact journey had given me breadth, but their insights gave me depth—and a humility that I carry to this day.
Three decades have passed since that first tryst with Linux—and it has transformed me completely, for the better. I’m glad I stayed the course. Even today, my learning hasn’t ceased; I still explore intriguing new tools, languages, and features. Along the way, I began to notice a larger pattern—an intuition that formed nearly two decades ago: that this open-source ecosystem would one day shape the future of humanity. Linux evolved into the infrastructure upon which something new would take shape. GitHub and countless open-source repositories emerged, and today, everyday smart devices, the massive data centers, and the compute clusters that host AI—all run on Linux and open-source software.
Linux won in a peculiar way: not by becoming the operating system everyone saw, but by becoming the operating system beneath everything they stopped seeing. Once computation moved into servers, clouds, phones, embedded devices and eventually massive AI clusters, Linux was already waiting underneath.
But for me, its greatest gift was more personal. Linux gave a self-taught nineteen-year-old access to knowledge that proprietary systems kept behind walls. That access changed the trajectory of my life.
Tracing back the history of computing, I see a trajectory where our mental capabilities are progressively externalized onto machines—first our analytical skills as algorithms, and now our collective thinking, reasoning, and generative capacities at scale. And it’s profoundly satisfying to know that what began as a hobby project by a brilliant hacker in Finland now forms the backbone of computation’s future. Thousands—perhaps millions—of enthusiasts like me, who chose the untrodden road in those early years, now share a quiet sense of accomplishment. We didn’t just watch history unfold; we typed it, compiled it, and booted it—one command at a time.