FUNET
Finland's university network, whose FTP server is where Linux was first published.
The Finnish University and Research Network was built up from 1984 to link Finland's universities and is run by the state-owned CSC. Like the rest of the Nordic region it was multiprotocol — X.25, DECnet, BITNET — before TCP/IP won, and it reached the outside world through NORDUnet.
Fame came from the file server ftp.funet.fi, one of Europe's big archives. In September 1991 Linus Torvalds uploaded his kernel there. He had meant to call it Freax, but the administrator, Ari Lemmke, didn't like the name and called the directory linux instead. Torvalds let it stand. One of computing's best-known brands is, in other words, a directory name a sysadmin picked.