Summary: The article, "The early days of Linux," written by Lars Wirzenius, provides an account of the beginnings of Linux and its creation. Wirzenius met Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, during their computer science studies at the University of Helsinki in 1988. They explored Usenet and discussed the correct way to build an operating system. In 1991, Torvalds bought his first PC, a 386 CPU with 4MB of RAM, and started learning Intel assembly language. He showed Wirzenius a program that did multitasking, which later became the first version of the Linux kernel. Wirzenius wrote an implementation of the C sprintf() function for Torvalds, and the core of this code is still in the kernel as snprintf().