Linux is a widely used operating system created by Linus Torvalds, who oversees its open-source development.
In 1969, Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. The University of Helsinki awarded him a master’s degree in computer science in 1988. After completing his first year of study, he joined the Finnish Navy Nyland Brigade in the summer of 1989 to fulfill the country’s mandatory military service requirement. In addition to being a second lieutenant, he served as an artillery observer. Torvalds purchased Andrew Tanenbaum’s book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, in which Tanenbaum describes MINIX, an educational version of Unix. He resumed his university studies in 1990, and was exposed to Unix in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX. The title of his master’s thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
Linus authored a number of video game applications during his early years as a computer programmer. Having purchased an Intel 386 processor, he first used Minix, an operating system inspired by Unix that Andrew Tanenbaum created for use as a teaching tool. Torvalds began working on Linux in the fall of 1991 and released V1.0 in the spring of 1994 after forming a kernel development team to work on the new kernel.
Torvalds accepted an invitation to visit Transmeta in 1996, a company in the early stages of designing an energy-saving central processing unit (CPU). His family moved to California when Torvalds accepted a job at Transmeta. Torvalds continued to oversee Linux kernel development while also working for Transmeta.
In 2003, Torvalds left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel, backed by Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, and Novell. In order to promote Linux development, the consortium was formed. The Linux Foundation was formed in January 2007 after OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group. As far as adding new code to the standard Linux kernel is concerned, Torvalds continues to be the ultimate authority.
Torvalds married Tove Torvalds, a six-time Finnish national karate champion he met in late 1993. The course attendees were instructed to send Linus an email as a test, and Tove responded with an email asking for a date while Linus was running introductory computer lab exercises. Tove and Linus married later in life and had three daughters, two of whom were born in the United States.
Torvalds became a United States citizen in 2010 and registered to vote there. Quite frankly, he says he has too much pride to be associated with any political party in the United States.
In the early 2000s, Linus became interested in scuba diving and earned many certifications, which led to the Subsurface Project.
