1983 # September - Richard M. Stallman announces the GNU Project, an attempt at creating a completely free operating system.

1984 # January - Work begins on the GNU operating system

1985 # October - Free Software Foundation established as a non-profit organization to promote the development of Free Software. Sponsors the GNU Project.

1987 # December - Larry Wall releases version 1.0 of Perl, # January - Computer science professor Andrew Tannenbaum publishes the textbook Operating Systems: Design and Implementation which includes a copy of a teaching version of Unix called Minix.

1989 # February -Version 1 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is released.

1991 # December - Robert Blum posts the first Linux FAQ
September - Version 0.01 of Torvald's project is made available via ftp.funet.fi. Ari Lemmke, the systems administrator, gives the directory the name Linux.

August - Linus Torvalds announces that he's working on an operating system similar to Minix.
June - Version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is released.