Linus Torvalds received the IEEE Computer Pioneer award

Linus Torvalds, the creator and principal developer of the Linux kernel, won the 2014 Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society.



The Computer Pioneer Award has been awarded since 1981 to “express recognition and respect for the foresight of those people whose efforts have led to the creation and continued prosperity of the computer industry.” Under the conditions, these efforts must be made at least 15 years ago. The merits of the owner engraved on a personal bronze medal.



The first medal in 1981 was received by Jeffrey Chuan Chu for his early work in the design of logical integrated circuits. In the following years, John Kemeny for BASIC (1985), Niklaus Wirth for Pascal (1987), Douglas Engelbart for computer interaction interfaces (1992), Dennis Ritchie for Unix (1994), Aleksey Lyapunov and Sergey Lebedev for computers, cybernetics and programming in the USSR (1996), Gennady Stolyarov for creating software for computers of the Minsk series (2000), as well as many other prominent researchers.



A resident of the Finnish city of Helsinki began work on the Linux kernel in 1991. Fascinated by programming, the young man had previously developed several games. Linus wrote his OS on an Intel 386 computer, in a UNIX-like Minix operating system, which Andrew Tanenbaum created as a learning tool. After Torvalds assembled a group of like-minded people to develop the kernel, the first version was released in the spring of 1994. Just recently, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of this wonderful event.

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In 1996, Torvalds got a job at Californian startup Transmeta, which developed energy efficient CPUs. He moved to the USA and continued to coordinate work on the Linux kernel. In 2003, Torvalds retired from Transmeta and fully concentrated on this project Open Source. This was made possible thanks to a scholarship (salary) from the newly formed public organization The Linux Foundation (at the time it was called Open Source Development Labs).



Over the years, Linus Torvalds won numerous awards, including the Millennium Technology Prize from the Finnish Technology Academy (2012), C & C Prize from NEC (2010), Takreda Award (2008), Lovelace Medal from the British computer community (2000), Pioneer Award from the Foundation for Electronic Frontiers (1998).



Linus himself wanted to call the new operating system Freax, from the words “free” and “freak”, with the addition of X to indicate Unix. But his friend was administering an FTP server, where the new OS was first uploaded for download, and he created the “linux" folder for Torvalds.