Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, taught a class called Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. Unix was the operating system studied in the class. However, version 7 of the Unix studied, no longer allowed source code to be available to students. Tanenbaum eliminated this inconvenience by writing a small Unix like operating system called Minix that could be run on the Intel 80386 chip set.
In developing Minix, Tanenbaum juggled a large user base, at times enhancing Minix at their request. However, Tanenbaum was reluctant to meet every request due to the risk of cluttering Minix; after all, Minix was a teaching tool, and compromising the understandability of the code for new features was not profitable.
Linus Torvalds learned a great deal about programming a Unix operating system by studying Minix. In studying operating system design, Linus would tinker around on his 80386 by writing small code to perform what he had learned. Later, this learning phase evolved into a project called Linux. Linux was not the original name Linus had planned. Shamefully, Linus had planned to name the operating system "Freax - free + freak + x". As fate would have it, the operating system was named Linux, mostly because, a friend, Ari Lemmke, encouraged Linus to post his operating system on a network so that it could be easily downloaded. Ari gave Linus a directory on his server called linux. Linux was Linus' user name, he didn't wish that to be the name of his operating system, because he felt people would interpret that as arrogance.
Eventually, Linus set out to make "a better Minix than Minix". In his learning state, Linux created a useful multitasking news reader. This program worked stand-alone and without the framework of an operating system. Unfortunately, every time he used this program, he had to reboot his system to exit Minix and enter this news reader. Consequently, he decided to incorporate the useful features of Minix into his news reader program.
As Linux grew, Linus developed a user list of all the people using it. The early users were hackers that were, learning, debugging and porting applications. To handle portability issues for Unix products, Linus ported Linux every time applications were incompatible. This meant that Unix applications would not have to be ported to Linux.
Through the early development of Linux, Linus would post his messages about Linux updates on a news group dedicated to Minix. Here, Linus would encourage users to download his operating system and test it. At first this was accepted as Linux and Minix were both based on Unix. However, some Minix users grew tired of seeing message posted on the Minix news group for a rival operating system. These posting led to insults from Andrew Tannenbaum, the author of Minix. Tanenbaum felt Linux was obsolete as it was not a microkernel and because it specifically targeted the Intel 80386 chip, meaning the operating system was not portable. This insult led to further insults propagated back and forth between Andrew and Linus. Luckily these insult receded into something more friendly.