History of Linux cheap and popular Intel 386 architecture for personal computers. In the early nineties a commercial UNIX operating system for Intel 386 PCs was too expensive for private users. These factors and the lack of a widely adopted, free kernel provided the impetus for Torvalds' starting his project. He has stated that if either the GNU Hurd or 386BSD kernels had been available at the time, he likely would not have written his own. In 1991, while studying computer science at University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds began a project that later became the Linux kernel. He wrote the program specifically for
GEOS (8-bit operating system) fully reverse-engineered and rewritten as C for the cc65 compiler suite. The reverse-engineered source code has been made available at Github. Dozens of official and third-party applications and other products were produced for GEOS. Among the most important and popular were the following: GEOS (8-bit operating system) GEOS ("Graphic Environment Operating System") is a discontinued operating system from Berkeley Softworks (later GeoWorks). Originally designed for the Commodore 64 and released in 1986, it provides a graphical user interface for this popular 8-bit computer. GEOS closely resembles early versions of the classic Mac OS and includes a graphical word processor (geoWrite)