Linus Torvalds according to Linus Torvalds. The person behind the project

linustorvalds

Yesterday David did a chronicle on the 29 years of Linux reviewing some of the milestones in its history. But, What about the history of its creator? We all know that Finnish student Linus Torvalds announced in a Usenet message that he was developing an operating system, but his earlier story is not as well known.

Torvalds is not a common surname, not even in Finland. All those who wear it are related to each other. The lineage began with Ole Torvald Elis Saxberg, Linus's grandfather. The son of a single mother, he did not want to adopt his stepfather's last name and decided to delete the last part of his name. To make it sound more important, he added an S to the last name he had adopted.

This grandfather was a journalist and poet and published several books of which Linus claims never to have read any.

Linus's parents met at university during a field trip for a Swedish-speaking student club. Both parents worked as journalists.

Linus Torvalds according to Linus Torvalds

En a book published in 2001 he describes himself as an ugly boy. He was apparently a toothy tooth and had inherited the prominent nose of the Torvalds family. To this must be added glasses and in his own words "an atrocious taste in choosing clothes."

To finish complicating the picture, he was born on December 28, which made him the smallest in the class and he was naturally good at math. However, he didn't fit the cliché of nerd because he wasn't all bad at sports.

Linus tells that his first technological toy was an electronic calculator owned by his maternal grandfather Leo Waldemar Tornqvist, who was a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki. Little Torvalds used it to calculate the sine of various random numbers. But nOr he did it because he was a child prodigy. According to his confession it was because he liked to see how the old calculator blinked while doing the math.

He does not remember (at least at the time of writing the book we are consulting) which was the first computer he worked with, but he believes that it was a Commodore Vic 20 also owned by the same grandfather. Since Grandpa Leo was not entirely comfortable with computers, he wrote his programs with pencil and paper and had his grandson type them on the computer. When he wasn't copying his grandfather's shows I did it with the sample programs in the manuals. Then he started buying computer books and magazines and discovered machine code programming.

By imposition of his father (now divorced from his mother) he tries to play basketball for a year and a half, but ends up leaving him.

Mrs. Torvalds used to tell her co-workers that his son was low maintenance cost. All I needed was to lock him in a closet with a computer and give him some dry pasta every now and then.

Due to the divorce of his parents, Linus and his sister lived alternately (together or separately) in their parents' house) Economic difficulties forced his mother to have to pledge her share of the Helsinki Telephone Company several times (all subscribers have one) .Torvalds would become a board member of that company.

The teenager Linus attended a Swedish-speaking high school. Recognized good in Mathematics and Physics but poor at memorizing data and carpentry. I went to gym class except when it came to participating in some sports competition.

In college, he claims to have performed well in his first year, only to experience a nosedive later.. With another Swedish-speaking student also interested in computers, he joined a hard science club called Spektrum.

When it was his turn to do his military service, he opted for officer school. Upon graduation he was assigned to the task of fire controller. His task was to tell the shooters where to shoot (We are talking about the eighties, there were no drones)

After your military service He returned to the university where he stayed for eight years and graduated with a master's degree.


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  1.   Diego German Gonzalez said

    Thanks for your comment