On January 2, 1991 a young Helsinki student named Linus Torvalds went shopping for the most badass computer he could afford. He spent FIM 18,000 – about $3,500 – on a gray brick that came with a 33 megahertz processor and 4 megabytes of RAM.

This unremarkable machine turned out to be a historic computer. He used it to write his Usenet post, announcing the birth of Linux. And this was the hardware Torvalds used to painstakingly build the very first different emulators, drivers, and utilities that would help him turn Linux into the wold's most awesome operating system.

On Wednesday, he severed a final tie with that box. He accepted a patch forwarded by developer Ingo Molnar that dropped support for Intel's old 386 microprocessors, the brains of the DX33 system that Torvalds had purchased all those years ago. After a 15-year run, Intel stopped shipping 386 processors in late 2007.

In his notes explaining the patch, Molnar said that the patch – which was written by H. Peter Anvin – "zaps quite a bit of complexity from the kernel" and that it has caused extra work for Linux kernel developers over the years.

But he was a little wistful too. "Unfortunately there's a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won't be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore," he wrote. "Sniff."

Torvalds? He wasn't exactly misty eyed about the change. But that's Linus. "I'm not sentimental," he wrote back as he accepted the patch. "Good riddance."

A hat tip to Slashdot.

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Update: This story has been updated to clarify that the patch was written by H. Peter Anvin*