An interesting minix, linux story

[Justin]

Minix developed rapidly and soon had its own USENET newsgroup
(comp.os.minix), with 40,000 subscribers within 3 months, a large
number at a time when the Internet was only available to university
researchers and students. One of the early MINIX adopters was a
Finnish student named Linus Torvalds, who went out and bought a PC
just to run MINIX, studied it very carefully, and then decided to
write his own operating system, inspired by MINIX.

http://osnews.com/story.php/15960/Introduction-to-MINIX-3