Linux Is Born（Early-1990s film photography）

35 years agoThe Internet

1991-08-25

Linux Is Born

Torvalds announces his kernel project, which becomes the open-source foundation of servers and Android.

Art style · Early-1990s film photography

World population

5.46Bpeople

Primary energy power

1.2×10¹³W

London → New York message

0.03 seconds

Civilization metrics

Each sparkline shows the documented history of a metric on a logarithmic time axis. The dot marks the selected moment.

Kardashev index

0.708

Based on primary energy power · Type I = 1

World population

5.46Bpeople

1/2 of today

Total human primary energy power

1.2×10¹³W

1/2 of today

Compute per dollar

2350.5floating-point operations per second per dollar (FLOP/s per $, nominal dollars)

1/34.59M of today

Fastest delivery time for a message from London to New York

0.03 seconds

1 times faster than today

Fastest speed reached by humans

39,897km/h

Comparable to today

Near this moment

The eight closest milestones. Select a title to jump there.

1986-10-09Intelligence
Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams publish a method for training multilayer networks in Nature. Source
1990-04-24Universe
Orbiting above the atmosphere, the telescope delivers sharp images of deep space and measures the expansion rate of the universe. Source
1991Energy
Sony introduces the commercial lithium-ion battery, giving phones, laptops and electric cars a lightweight power source. Source
1991-08-06Computing
Berners-Lee publicly releases the World Wide Web project. Source
1991-08-25Computing
Torvalds announces his kernel project, which becomes the open-source foundation of servers and Android. Source
1994-04-20Computing
China gains full-function access to the global internet via a 64K leased line. Source
1996-07-05Humanity
The first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell is born. Source
1997Intelligence
Long short-term memory networks let recurrent neural networks remember much longer sequences. Source

Capabilities

Acquired62 / 126 items

Recently acquired

Not yet available

Scenes across eras

Choose an era to explore its scenes.

The Internet

4 scenes · Select a scene to visit that moment

The World Wide Web and search engines connect the world's information, and the cost of accessing knowledge plummets.

Playable workshops

Completed 0 / 15All workshops →

15 moments in history to explore by hand.

Diamonds on the timeline mark playable scenes. Select a date to travel there, or enter a workshop directly.

Every timeline entry cites its source. Metrics interpolate logarithmically between sourced data points. Forecasts include institutional and community views, and attributed site scenarios; years are not guaranteed realization dates. Illustrations are AI-generated in each era's style.

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