Linux Certification

Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5%) of Finland’s population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, “I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character,” noting that this makes him half “Nobel-prize-winning chemist” and half “blanket-carrying cartoon character”.

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science from NODES research group. His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Army, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland. In the army he holds the rank of second lieutenant, with the role of a ballistic calculation officer. In 1990, he resumed his university studies, and was exposed to UNIX for the first time, in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.

His interest in computers began with a Commodore VIC-20. After the VIC-20 he purchased a Sinclair QL which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an assembly language and a text editor for the QL, as well as a few games. He is known to have written a Pac-Man clone named Cool Man. On January 5, 1991 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC and spent a month playing the game Prince of Persia before receiving his MINIX copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux.

Linux Development

Linus quickly developed the terminal emulation program and it was sufficient for his needs for a while. However, Linus began thinking that it would be nice to be able to do other things with it like tranferring and saving files. This is where Linux was really born. Originally, Linus wanted to name his creation ‘Freax’ (pronounced like the English word freaks). He changed it to Linux at the prompting of a friend. In August, 1991, Linus announced on Usenet that he was working on this operating system:

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)

Newsgroups: comp.os.minix

Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?

Summary: small poll for my new operating system

Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>

Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT

Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and

professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.  This has been brewing

since april, and is starting to get ready.  I’d like any feedback on

things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat

(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)

among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.

This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and

I’d like to know what features most people would want.  Any suggestions

are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS.  Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.

It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never

will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have .

Linus uploaded the first version of Linux, version 0.01 in September of 1991. Then Linux belonged to the world.

Marriage and a Family

In 1993, Linus was teaching an introductory computer course at the University of Helsinki. A young woman in the class named Tove Monni emailed him and asked him out on a date. She would later become his wife. Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni) — a six-time Finnish national karate champion — whom he first met in the autumn of 1993. Torvalds was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendants to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date. Tove and Linus were later married and have three daughters, Patricia, Daniela, and Celeste.

Recognition

• In 1996 Asteroid 9793 Torvalds was named after Linus Torvalds.
• In 1997 he received his Master degree (Laudatur Grade) from Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki.
• In 1998 he received an EFF Pioneer Award.
• In 1999 he received honorary doctor status at Stockholm University.
• The 1999 novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson features several characters who use “Finux”, a Unix-like operating system developed in Finland.
• In 2000 he received honorary doctor status at University of Helsinki.
• In 2000 he was awarded the Lovelace Medal.
• In the Time magazine’s Person of the Century Poll, Torvalds was voted at #17 at the poll’s close in 2000.
• In 2001, he shared the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura.
• In 2004, he was named one of the most influential people in the world by the Time magazine article “Linus Torvalds: The Free-Software Champion” by Lawrence Lessig
• In the search for the 100 Greatest Finns of all time, voted in the summer of 2004, Torvalds placed 16th.
• In 2005 he appeared as one of “the best managers” in a survey by BusinessWeek.
• In August 2005, Torvalds received the Vollum Award from Reed College.
• In 2006, Business 2.0 magazine named him one of “10 people who don’t matter” because the growth of Linux has shrunk Torvalds’ individual impact.
• In 2006, Time Magazine—Europe Edition named him one of the revolutionary heroes of the past 60 years.
• In 2008, he was inducted into the Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
• In 2010, Torvalds was listed in the book The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time as one of the most important and influential inventors.

Gradually Taken Information from many resources including wikipedia and http://www.linux.org/info/linus.html