Linus Torvalds. Mighty finn

Linus Torvalds, probably the most famous programmer in the world, as well as one of the most famous Finns. He is the founder and coordinator of the religion whose name is Linux, a trend that has continued the revolution in the computer industry for many years. He really is one of the greatest legends of the computer world.



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Early years.
Linus Benedict Torvalds Born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, the capital and largest city of Finland. He was named after Linus Pauling, the famous chemist and winner of the Nobel Prize.
The Torvalds family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, which is estimated at 300,000 people, with a total population of Finland of approximately 5,000,000.

It so happened that most of his family members were journalists.
His father was a communist who even spent a year studying in Moscow in the mid-1970s, and later became a radio journalist. Mother worked for a long time in the publishing house of a well-known Finnish newspaper as a translator.
In addition, his grandfather was the chief editor of another Finnish newspaper, and his uncle worked in television.

Linus had a rather happy childhood, despite the fact that his parents divorced when he was still very young. He stayed with his mother and grandparents.
Taking into account what almost all the members of his family were doing, from early childhood a great emphasis was placed on the boy’s development on reading.
It was the maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had such a great influence on Linus. In the mid-1970s, his grandfather bought him one of the first personal computers, the Vic 20 Commodore.




Linus quickly got bored with a few standard set of programs that came with the computer and decided to try (and quite successfully) to create their own, first learning the notorious BASIC, and then much more difficult, but also much more unleashing the assembler.
Programming and mathematics were almost the only passions of Torvalds.

The efforts of his father to interest him in sports sections, girls and other social interests of ordinary children were in vain, and later Linus Torvalds did not hesitate to admit that he never had any particular cravings for this, and was not particularly talented in this.

Linux is born
In 1987, Linus collected all of his savings and bought his first own computer, Sinclair QL.
It was one of the first 32-bit computers in the world intended for home use. He worked on a Motorola 68008 processor with a frequency of 7.5 MHz and had 128 KB of RAM, and this was a great step forward after the Commodore Vic 20 donated by his grandfather.



Soon, Linus again disappointed in the purchase, since the operating system of this model is stitched in ROM and is not subject to reprogramming without special equipment.
In 1988, Torvalds follows in the footsteps of his parents and joins the harmonious ranks of students at the University of Helsinki, the main educational institution in Finland.
By that time he is already an experienced programmer, and naturally specializes in computer science. In 1990, he attended the first lesson in learning the C programming language, which he will soon use to create the Linux kernel.


Further events are developing quite rapidly.
In early 1991, he buys another computer, with an Intel 386 processor at 33 MHz and 4 MB of memory.
This processor was a significant breakthrough compared to earlier Intel and Linus chips, but it is again disappointed when it comes up against an operating system that came with a newly purchased electronic miracle. Have you guessed it? It was that MS-DOS. By that time, this OS was not even so advanced as to take advantage of such a cool Intel 386 chip, and Linus Torvalds decides that he will use the much more powerful and stable UNIX OS, to which he has become accustomed to university computers.


Thus, Torvalds tried to get hold of the UNIX version for his new PC, and fortunately he cannot even find a basic UNIX configuration for less than $ 5000.
Next, Linus looks to MINIX, a small UNIX clone created by operating system expert Andrew Tanenbaum in the Netherlands to teach UNIX to university students.

However, although much more powerful than MS-DOS and designed to work with Intel x86 processors,
MINIX still had some very serious flaws. They included the fact that not all of the source code was made public to the public, Minix also had much less functionality and performance than Unix, and to top it all off was not completely free (although its cost was ten times lower any OS on the market at the time).

And Torvalds decides to create a new operating system from scratch, which would be based on MINIX and UNIX. It is unlikely that he fully imagined the enormous amount of work that would be needed, and even less likely that he imagined the effect that his decision would have on his future life and on the rest of the world.

On August 25, 1991, he announces the creation of a new OS in the MINIX conference (comp.os.minix)

Message-ID: 1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi
From: torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see in Minix?
(A small survey for my new operating system)

Hello to all Minix users -

I develop an operating system (free, just a hobby - not so big and
professional as GNU) for 386 (486) processors. I started back in April and now I already have
first results. I would like to know what you like / dislike about Minix, because my
The OS is based on it in something (the same file system structure — but this is purely
practical considerations).

I have already ported bash (1.08), gcc (1.40) and everything seems to work fine. It follows that in
Over the next few months, I will receive the first working version and therefore I would like
know what people need the most.
Any suggestions are welcome, but I do not promise that I will implement them :)

Linus Torvalds torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi



To be continued...

Linus Famous Quotes (ru.wikiquote.org)

• “Here I want to talk about my golden rules. First: treat others the way you want them to treat you. Following this rule, in any situation you will know what to do. Second, be proud of what you are doing. Third: do everything with pleasure. ”
• “Everyone who has read this column will think that the growing burden of my role as the main hacker turned me into a bastard. But this is not true. I've always been a bastard. ”
• “I brought the girls home only when they wanted to work out. It was not so often, and I was never the initiator, but my father harbors illusions that they wanted to study not only mathematics. (In his opinion, they bought all the same formula: a significant nose = a significant man). ”
• “Programs are like sex: better when it's free.”
• "Microsoft is not evil, it's just that they have really lousy operating systems."
• "My name is Linus, and I am your God."
• "You see, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you also have to be a smart ass bitch son."
• Linux philosophy: "Laugh in the face of danger." Oh. Not that. "Do it yourself". Yes, right.
• “Some told me that a fat penguin, in their opinion, does not fully embody the grace of Linux. But in my opinion, an angry penguin never rushed at them at a speed of 200 km / h. ”
• “Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, but so that it is done at the same time.”
• 
  When you say, "I wrote a program that drops Windows," people just look at you stupidly and answer: "Yes, I got such programs with the system, for free."
• 
  “I have no doubt that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I strongly doubt is that it will someday have the kind of influence that those who are concerned with virtualization want. ”
• 
  “So, most of you are likely to suffer unbearably from boredom at Christmas, and here you have the perfect entertainment. Test the 2.6.15-rc7. All stores will be closed, and in fact there will be no better occupation between eating food. ”

And probably the most famous


Fragment from the film "Revolutionary OS" (in Russian)
In it, Linus talks about why the logo - Penguin


And to crown it all - the blog of the great and terrible