What Is Linus Torvalds?

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Linus Torvalds is the kind of person who sends a text to his mom with an apology for being late for dinner because he was stuck in traffic. He's a man who has created two of the essential pieces of software used by millions, and he does it all from his home office in California. Born in Helsinki, Finland, Linus Torvalds moved to the United States as a child. His interest in computers started early at just 12 years old. He got his first computer (a Commodore 64) and began programming. After high school, Linus attended Oregon State University, majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics. He graduated with honors in 1987 and worked at Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI), where he developed the first commercial version of GIT: a distributed revision control system used by many software developers today. In 1991, Linus founded Linux International (LINC), intending to promote Linux as an alternative to proprietary UNIX operating systems like those sold by SGI or Sun Microsystems Incorporated (SUN). In 1991 he also created the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which is used today by tens of thousands of developers worldwide. Torvalds was a computer engineering major in the early 90s, but he didn't just sit in his dorm room and play video games all day. He attended the University of Helsinki between 1988 and 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science from the NODES research group. During his university years, one of his course books was Andrew Tenenbaum's "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation," where he was introduced to MINIX, a stripped-down version of Unix that led him to a fascination with Unix's clear structure and underlying philosophy. Minix is an operating system originally written by Andrew S.Tanenbaum for educational purposes. Torvalds has said that he likes MINIX because it is simple enough to easily change it and understand what is happening under the hood.

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Trending Definitions

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