In August 1991, Linus Torvalds announced his Linux operating system, which was based on Unix, in a Usenet posting. He originally created the Linux kernel to work on an 80386 processor PC, which was running the Minix operating system and a GNU, C compiler. However, a kernel does not make an OS, so the other necessary pieces; that is, the shell, compilers, library, tools, etc. were developed by the GNU project and released under its General Public License in 1992. Once all the components were integrated, Linux was officially born. The penguin mascot was added in 1996 and the rest is history.