Biography

Linus Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. His parents, Anna and Nils (who divorced soon after Linus’s birth) were radicals from the University of Helsinki and worked as journalists. Despite the divorce, Linus had a reasonably conventional childhood and lived with his mother and grandparents. When Linus was 10, he got his first computer, a Commodore Vic 20, and became obsessed with programming. He was urged by his family to try out sports and girls and conventional activities, but Linus firmly stuck to computers. At first he programmed in BASIC, then he switched to machine code, which communicates directly to the hardware. In 1988, Linus entered Helsinki University and began studying computer science. Two years later, he discovered and started using the operating system UNIX because the one he was using beforehand frustrated him.

Linus showing off Linux

After buying a PC with a version of UNIX called MINIX, Linus started tweaking the operating system to make it be able to do certain operations. He became a recluse and coded whenever possible. When the sun rose for the first time after winter, everyone went out and celebrated - except for Linus. He was in his bathrobe, locked in a room, coding. Eventually, after months of virtually nonstop tweaking, he realized that he had created what could potentially be the kernel of a whole new operating system. By then, the code was still rough and needed editing and optimization. Linus had heard of the open-source movement and the need for free software, and an idea struck. He sent a message to the world that he was writing a kernel for an operating system and released the source code. He allowed everyone to edit the code and asked for feedback. Suddenly, he was receiving thousands of messages from all around the world, all from people who were using and editing the new operating system. One of the world’s biggest collaborations had just begun. At first, Linus wanted to name the system “Freax", a mix of “free”, ”freak”,  and “UNIX” (to indicate that the system was free and UNIX-like), but a friend of his named Ari Lemmke wrote down the name as Linux. Linus thought the name sounded too egotistical, but later conceded that there was a part of him that liked the recognition and that he thought the name “Freax” was bad. (Linus is known for his self-deprecation.)

Richard Stallman

Bill Gates's house

Linux served as the kernel for GNU, the operating system created by Richard Stallman. When people started calling the whole system Linux, instead of GNU-Linux, Stallman became angry. By the late 1990’s, as Microsoft grew more and more bureaucratic, Linus, with his free and open-source operating system, became popular and was seen as the anti-Gates. While Bill Gates lived in a gorgeous lakeside mansion, Linus led a relatively non-glamorous lifestyle in a small duplex in Santa Clara. Linus had no objections or ill feelings about Microsoft’s wealth or success, he simply did not like their products. He said once that “Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems”. Linus’s contributions to Linux add up to about 2 percent, however, with its thousands of contributors, 2 percent is huge. Many of the famous collaborations in computer history involve two or three people, but this one involved the world.

In 1993, when Linus was teaching an Intro to Computer Science course at the University of Helsinki, his first homework assignment was to have everyone write him an e-mail. One of the students, Tove Minni, wrote him an e-mail that asked him on a date. Linus accepted and they were later married. They now have three daughters. Today, despite Linux’s success, Linus and his family live in a normal neighborhood and do not live glamorously at all. Once, he and his wife went to a party with many celebrities (which was a rare event for them), and they annoyed one man by not asking him his name once, but twice. Linus considers himself an atheist, and although his family has a history of political involvement, he does not affiliate himself with any political party. Today, Linus lives near Portland, Oregon with his family.