About Linus Torvalds creator of Linux
Early life
Born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland Linus Torvalds is the son of Nils and Anna Torvalds. His parents were both journalists and Linus gained an interest in computers from his maternal grandfather. Maths was Linus’ favourite subject in secondary school. Swedish (not Finnish) is Linus and his family’s first language.
University student
Linus Torvalds studied computer science at the University of Helsinki in 1988. His first PC had an Intel 386 CPU, he used Minix, an Unix-inspired operating system created by Andrew Tannenbaum for use as a teaching tool. However, Linus was not happy with the system especially its inability to do terminal emulation, so he decided to do the terminal emulation program himself, independently of Minix. These were the first steps toward creating Linux.
Linux development
The terminal emulation program was developed and worked well for a while but Linus was ambitious and decided to do other activities such as tranferring and saving files – this is where Linux was created. Linux was originally going to be called 'Freax' (pronounced like the English word freaks) but a friend recommended he change it to Linux.
In August 1991, Linus announced on Usenet that he was working on this operating system. He uploaded the first version of Linux, version 0.01 in September of 1991. Then Linux was freely available to everyone.
Marriage and a family
Linus’ wife is called Tove Monni and they have three daughters together, Patricia, Miranda and Daniela.
To the USA and Transmeta
In 1997 Linus accepted a position at Transmeta, a start-up company in the first stages of designing an energy saving CPU. He moved to California with his family but still continued to oversee kernel development.
Open source development laboratory
Linus left Transmeta in 2003, he wanted to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel and he then began to work under the auspices of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) a consortium formed by high-tech companies which include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. The purpose of the consortium is to promote Linux development.
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