Linus Torvalds
Creator, Linux
Biography
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish and American software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel since 1991. He also created the distributed version control system Git.
Career Timeline
Linus Benedict Torvalds[a] (born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish and American software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel since 1991.
His interest in computers began with a VIC-20 at the age of 11 in 1981.
Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science from the NODES research group.
In 1990, Torvalds resumed his university studies, and was exposed to Unix for the first time in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX.
On 5 January 1991 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC clone before receiving a copy of MINIX, which in turn enabled him to begin work on Linux.
Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni), a six-time Finnish national karate champion, whom he met in late 1993.
After a visit to Transmeta in late 1996, Torvalds accepted a position at the company in California, where he worked from February 1997 to June 2003.
From 1997 to 1999, he was involved in 86open, helping select the standard binary format for Linux and Unix.
Notable Quotes
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
"Torvalds, Linus (1991-08-25). Post. news:comp.os.minix. Google Groups. Archived from the original on unknown. Retrieved on 2006-08-28. This was the launch of Linux."
"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?"