Cyclades Corporation (the company I work for) was the first hardware company in the world to officially develop and support Linux drivers in 1994 (and this is an acknolowdged fact). At that time, I was the only full-time SW engineer and I was writing Linux software as part of my full-time job.
I believe that combination was a first in the world. Most people were writing Linux code as a hobby and a very few, as contractors. After all, at that time, paying people to write free software was a novelty idea.
Linux is an Operating System. It is special because it has become the most successful among the ones developed under the "Open Source" model.
Open Source is a new expression for "Free Software". Open Source software is distributed with source code, which is the program in human-readable form. This was not common in the commercial world (because keeping source code secret, forces people to buy the object code from you).
I won't spend time advocating for Open Source (you can look at the Open Source link in my links page). It is enough to say that I believe in Open Source because it makes business sense. Software development in the 80's and 90's was extremely inefficient because everybody had to reinvent the wheel. With Open source, one can build on top of other have built. Effort goes into innovation, not re-creation.
Linux started early in the 90's. In 1992, not a lot of people had heard of that.
The Internet created both the demand for Linux (we needed something to run the WEB servers) and the media that accelerated Open Source development. There are other Open Source OSes, but Linux is the best example of good timing.