Richard Stallman developed a UNIX-like operating system (developed at BellLabs in 1971 and used at many universities and research centers). With typical hacker humor, he called it GNU (Gnu is Not Unix). He distributed it “free, like air.” Stallman, however, struggled to complete a successful version, which was ultimately done by a Swedish-speaking Finn, Linus Torvalds, who launched Linux in 1991.
