Linus Torvalds. Mighty finn

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    Linus Torvalds is probably the most famous programmer in the world, as well as one of the most famous Finns. He is the founder and coordinator of a religion called Linux, a movement that has continued the revolution in the computer industry for many years. He really is one of the greatest legends of the computer world.


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    Early years.
    Linus Benedict Torvalds Born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, the capital and largest city of Finland. He was named after Linus Pauling, the famous chemist and Nobel Prize winner.
    The Torvalds family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, which is estimated at 300,000, with a total population of Finland of approximately 5,000,000.

    It so happened that most of his family members were journalists.
    His father was a communist who even spent a year studying in Moscow in the mid-1970s, and later became a radio journalist. Mother worked for a long time as a translator in the publishing house of the famous Finnish newspaper.
    In addition, his grandfather was the editor-in-chief of another Finnish newspaper, and his uncle worked on television.

    Linus had a rather happy childhood, despite the fact that his parents divorced when he was still very young. He stayed to live with his mother and grandparents.
    Taking into account what almost all members of his family did, from early childhood, a huge emphasis on reading was made in the development of the boy.
    It was the maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had such a big impact on Linus. In the mid-1970s, his grandfather bought him one of the first personal computers, Commodore Vic 20.
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    Linus quickly got bored with the few standard set of programs that came with the computer and decided to try (and quite successfully) create his own, first studying the notorious BASIC, and then a much more difficult, but also much more free hand assembler.
    Programming and mathematics have become almost the only passions of Torvalds.
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    The efforts of his father to interest ordinary children in sports sections, girls and other social interests were in vain, and later Linus Torvalds, not embarrassed, admits that he never had any special attraction for this, and was not particularly talented in this.

    Birth of Linux
    In 1987, Linus gathered all his savings and bought his first own computer, Sinclair QL.
    It was one of the first 32-bit computers in the world for home use. He worked on a 7.5 MHz MHz Motorola 68008 processor and had 128 KB of RAM, and that was a big step forward after the Commodore Vic 20 presented by his grandfather.
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    Soon, Linus again disappointed in the purchase, since the operating system of this model is flashed in ROM and can not be reprogrammed without special equipment.
    In 1988, Torvalds followed in the footsteps of his parents and joined the ranks of students at the University of Helsinki, Finland's main educational institution.
    By that time, he was already an experienced programmer, and naturally specialized in computer science. In 1990, he attended the first lesson in teaching the C programming language, which he would soon use to create the Linux kernel.

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    Further events are developing quite rapidly.
    At the beginning of 1991, he bought another computer, with an Intel 386 processor at 33 MHz and 4 MB of memory.
    This processor was a significant breakthrough compared to earlier Intel chips, and Linus was delighted, but again disappointed when it encounters an operating system that came with a newly purchased electronic miracle. Guessed? It was the same MS-DOS. By then, this OS was not even developed to take advantage of such a cool Intel 386 chip, and Linus Torvalds decides that he will use a much more powerful and stable UNIX OS, which he is used to on university computers.

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    Thus, Torvalds tried to get hold of the UNIX version for his new PC, and fortunately he cannot even find the basic UNIX configuration for less than $ 5000.
    Next, Linus looks toward MINIX, a small UNIX clone created by operating system expert Andrew Tanenbaum in the Netherlands to teach UNIX university students.

    However, although much more powerful than MS-DOS and designed to work with Intel x86 processors,
    MINIX still had very serious flaws. They included the fact that not all the source code was published to the public, Minix also had much reduced functionality and functionality compared to Unix, and to top it all, it was not completely free (although its cost was ten times lower any OS on the market at that time).

    And Torvalds decides to create a new operating system from scratch, which would be based on both MINIX and UNIX. It is unlikely that he fully imagined the enormous amount of work that would be necessary, and even less likely that he imagined the effect that his decision would have on his future life and the rest of the world.
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    On August 25, 1991, he announces the creation of a new OS at the MINIX conference (comp.os.minix)

    Message-ID: 1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi
    From: torvalds@klaava.helsinki.fi (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
    To: Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
    Subject: What would you like to see on Minix?
    (A small poll for my new operating system)

    Hello to all Minix users -

    I am developing an operating system (free, just a hobby - not as big and
    professional as GNU) for 386 (486) processors. I started back in April and now I have the
    first results. I would like to know what you like / dislike about Minix, because my
    OS is based on it in something (the same structure of the file system is purely for
    practical reasons).

    I have already ported bash (1.08), gcc (1.40) and everything seems to work fine. It follows that over the
    next few months I will receive the first working version and therefore I would like to
    know what people need most.
    Any suggestions are welcome, but I do not promise that I will bring them to life :)

    Linus Torvalds torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi

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    To be continued ...

    Famous Quotes from Linus (en.wikiquote.org)
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    • “Here I want to talk about my golden rules. First: treat others the way you want them to treat you. Following this rule, in any situation you will know what to do. Second: be proud of what you are doing. Third: do everything with pleasure. ”
    • “Everyone who reads this column will think that the growing burdens of my role as the main hacker turned me into a bastard. But this is not true. I've always been a bastard. "
    • “I brought the girls home only when they wanted to work out. This was not so often, and I was never the initiator, but my father has the illusion that they wanted to study not only mathematics. (In his opinion, they all bought the same formula: significant nose = significant man). ”
    • “Programs are like sex: it's better when it's free.”
    • "Microsoft is not evil, they just have really lousy operating systems."
    • "My name is Linus, and I am your God."
    • "You see, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you also have to be a cunning son of a bitch."
    • Linux Philosophy: "Laugh in the face of danger." Oh. Not that. "Do it yourself". Yes, right.
    • “Some told me that the fat penguin, in their opinion, does not fully embody the grace of Linux. But in my opinion, they just never rushed an angry penguin at a speed of under 200 km / h. "
    • "Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, but so that it is done at the same time."

    • When you say, "I wrote a program that drops Windows," people just stupidly look at you and answer: "Yes, I got such programs with the system, for free."

    • “I have no doubt that virtualization is useful in some areas. “What I doubt very much is that it will someday have the kind of influence that those who are involved in virtualization want.”

    • “So, most of you are likely to be unbearably tormented by boredom on Christmas, and here you have the perfect entertainment. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All stores will be closed, and in fact there will be no better occupation between eating food. ”


    And probably the most famous
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    fragment from the film “Revolutionary OS” (in Russian).
    In it Linus talks about why the logo is Penguin


    And to top it all off - The Great and the Terrible Blog


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