First thing I searched for is GCC and I'm really glad he emphasizes how important it was to the origins of Linux. It's historically under appreciated how critical GCC was at that time, how it had far far reaching impacts that changed the path of computing globally.

GCC not only makes Linux possible, but it brought the other unixes closer together, which is instrumental to escaping the vendor lock of the various *nix vendors. That means by the time Linux is reliable enough for production, there is already a lot of cross-platform software to run on it.