Biography
Linus Torvalds didn’t build an app or a website, he invented a whole new language that brought computer programming to the masses and irrevocably changed the way that people interfaced with computers and built their own visions with the creation of the Linux kernel in 1991.
Born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1969 to a pair of journalist parents, Torvalds has plenty of historic figures in his family, including poet Ole Torvalds, statistician Leo Tornqvist, and journalist/soldier Toivo Karanko. Torvalds had high expectations, being named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize winning American chemist. He bought his first computer when he was 11 in 1981 and started experimenting with the programming language BASIC .
He entered the University of Helsinki in 1988, and spent the next eight years working his way up to a master’s degree in computer science. His education was interrupted by a one-year mandatory stint in Finland’s military, where he served in the country’s navy, rising to the rank of second lieutenant.
In 1990, he was first exposed to the book “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” and got his first look at Unix, the computer operating system that was developed at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. In 1991 he started a personal project while in school to create a new operating system kernel that would be free to use. Torvalds wanted an independent operating system for his new personal computer. Instead he wound up creating an entirely new system kernel.
On August 25, 1991 when he was 21 years old, he announced his new system in a newsgroup (the precursor to today’s message boards called comp.os.minix. The name is a combination of his own first name and an homage to UNIX . He posted on the board asking his fellow users to test it out and let him know what they liked and what they didn’t.
The following year he published a new version that integrated GNU components to make it a completely functional system that was completely free. Taking off from the one user group, a LInux community sprang up swiftly. Companies began using it for their own projects. In 1996, Torvalds took a job with Silicon Valley company Transmeta, working there for seven years.
He then moved to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), which merged with Standards Group to become The Linux Foundation. This nonprofit had the purpose of optimizing Linux for use all over the world. Torvalds is a huge believer that all software should be free and open source.
Torvalds followed up Linux with the development of Git, a version controlled software that has also become widely used. In 2011, he created the open-source free software called Subsurface which has the purpose of planning and logging scuba diving trips.
