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Linus Torvalds
Birth at
28 December 1969
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Linus Torvalds was born on 28 December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. His parents, Niels and Anna Torvalds – Finns by nationality – were radical students in the 60s, his father was then a Communist Party member and lived in Moscow for a year. Linus was named after the American chemist Linus Pauling. In high school, Torvalds was a shy, modest boy, but he did very well.
He showed special success in physics and mathematics. In 1981, Leo's grandfather introduced his grandson to the Commodore VIC-20 computer,
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Linus Torvalds was born on 28 December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. His parents, Niels and Anna Torvalds – Finns by nationality – were radical students in the 60s, his father was then a Communist Party member and lived in Moscow for a year. Linus was named after the American chemist Linus Pauling. In high school, Torvalds was a shy, modest boy, but he did very well.
He showed special success in physics and mathematics.
In 1981, Leo's grandfather introduced his grandson to the Commodore VIC-20 computer, and Linus became interested in programming. He began writing his own programs in Basic, and later in Assembler. After graduation in 1988, Linus entered the University of Helsinki for a computer science course. During his studies, he was taken to the army for a year, after which he continued his studies and in 1996 graduated from university with a master’s degree in cybernetics.
After reading the book Operating Systems: Development and Implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum, Lindus realized that programming technologies are limitless. In his book, Tanenbaum presented the structure of the UNIX family of systems. Lindus later bought a new computer based on the 386th processor and installed a "Minix" on it. He quickly discovered flaws in the system and wrote his own terminal emulator, gradually adding more and more features. In the end, it was a complete operating system.
On September 17, 1991, Linus released the source code of the program (version 0.01) for public download. This innovation immediately aroused interest among thousands of programmers, who became who could improve the discovery. The program is called Linux. She's been talked about all over the world. Linus described his revolutionary activity in programming in his book The Tale of an Unexpected Revolutionary.
Since February 1997, Linus Torvalds worked at Transmeta Corporation, and in 2003 he moved to Open Source Development Labs.
Linus Torvalds lives in Portland with his wife Tove. They have three children.