Linus Torvalds - creator of Linux
Early life
Linus Torvalds was born on December 28th 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. Linus Torvalds is the son of Nil sans Anna Torvalds, who were both journalists. It was down to Linus’ maternal grandfather as to why he took an interest in computers.
Linus’ favourite subject in secondary school was Mathematics. Linus and his family’s first language is Swedish (not Finnish).
University student
Linus Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki in which he studied Computer Science in 1988. His first PC was an Intel 386 CPU and he used the operating system Minix, which is a Unix-inspired operating system, created by Andrew Tannenbaum for use as a teaching tool.
Linus was not happy with the system, however, especially with its inability to do terminal emulation. He therefore decided to do the terminal emulation program himself, independently of Minix. These were the first steps towards the creation of Linux.
Linux development
For a while, the terminal emulation program was developed and worked well but Linus was ambitious, and decided to do other activities. These activities included transferring and saving files – which is where Linux was created.
A friend of Linus recommended the name Linux, as Linus had originally wanted to call it ‘Freax’ (pronounced like the English word ‘freaks’).
Linus announced on Usenet that he was working on this operating system in August 1991. In September of 1991, he uploaded the first version of Linux, version 0.01. Linux was then freely available to everyone.
Marriage and a family
Linus has three daughters, Patricia, Miranda and Daniela, with his wife Tove Monni.
To the USA and Transmeta
Linus accepted a position at Transmeta in 1997, which is a start-up company in the first stages of designing an energy saving CPU. He moved to California with his family but still continued to oversee kernel development.
Open source development laboratory
In 2003, Linus left Transmeta because he wanted to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel. He then began to work under the auspices of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. Promoting Linux development is the purpose of the consortium.
Authority on Linux
Linus has written about 2% of the current Linux kernel himself. Such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code, since Linux has had thousands of contributors. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel.
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