Torvalds Linus: biography, photos and achievements

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:42

Linus Torvalds, whose biography is presented in the article, was born in a family of journalists in Finland, where he grew up. At school, he was considered a nerd because of his hobbies and appearance. Short and frail, the youngest child in the class, ugly (by his own admission), Linus was very passionate about technology. Communication with peers was of little interest to him. Torvalds Linus was an excellent student in physics and mathematics, sometimes to the detriment of the humanities. The photo below shows the school that Linus attended.

Introducing the world of computers

The true guru and indisputable authority for him was Leo Waldemar Turnqvist, maternal grandfather. He worked at the University of Helsinki where he was a professor of statistics. It was this man who opened the world of computers for his grandson. At the age of 11, Torvalds was already mastering the Commodore VIC-20, while also learning Basic programming, since this computer was not good for anything else.

After a while, Torvalds got tired of the monotonous input of programs. LinusTorvalds (his photo is presented above) began to buy up all computer magazines and books that appeared in the country. In a magazine, Linus found a program for Morse code. It was not created in BASIC, like all the others he had met before, but was just a set of numbers. They could be translated manually into machine language, written in a chain of ones and zeros understandable to a computer.

Torvalds Linus realized that BASIC is a part of the computer, and then began to study its other sides. When his grandfather died, he plunged headlong into working with the computer that Linus inherited.

Linus Family

We have already told about the grandfather and his role in the fate of our hero. As for other members of the family, Torvalds' parents are still working in the field of journalism. Niels Torvalds, father, radio and television journalist. Anna Torvalds, mother of Linus, is the literary editor. Sister Sarah runs a translation agency, primarily translating news reports. Linus Torvalds himself, whose biography has nothing to do with journalism, is skeptical about this profession.

Youth years

In his youth, Linus, unlike many of his peers, was not attracted to either hockey and football or flirting with girls. Torvalds was completely absorbed in working with computers.

Then Linus Torvalds went to university. After studying there for a year, he was drafted into the army, where he improved his he alth and pumped up his muscles in physical training classes. After demobilization, Torvalds returned to his studies at the university. It is this education althe institution gave him an impetus to programming at a serious level. All further life of Torvalds is connected with the development of the world-famous operating system.

Even at the age of 17, in 1987, Linus bought a new product, the Sinclair QL, to replace the outdated VIC-20. This computer had 128 KB of memory. He worked on an eight-megahertz processor from Motorola. The price of a computer at that time was about $2,000. It was produced by a company under the auspices of C. Sinclair.

Interest in operating systems

Almost immediately, Linus developed an interest in various operating systems. In order to install the floppy control purchased by Torvalds, he needed to write his own device driver. Then he found punctures in the operating system. Linus discovered that what actually happened did not match what was promised in the documentation.

Torvalds' next step was to disassemble the Q-DOS OS that was installed on his own computer. Linus was disappointed to learn that nothing could be changed in this system, since it was written in ROM.

Linus first wrote some games on the new computer. He borrowed the ideas of most of them from an old computer. The installed OS, however, had many shortcomings. For example, despite its multitasking, it did not have a memory protection function. The system could freeze at any moment. In addition, after the development of Sinclair QL, K. Sinclair stopped improving his models, as well as supportingexisting.

History of Linux

Linus, returning from the army, got acquainted with the Unix system. Together with 32 other students, Torvalds decided to take the C and Unix course. Since this system had just appeared at the time at the University of Helsinki, the teacher had to learn the new OS along with the students.

Linus was inspired by the book of Andrew Tatenbaum, a professor from Amsterdam, to create his own operating system. Torvalds claims that she turned his whole future life upside down. In this book ("Designing and Implementing Operating Systems"), the author describes Minix, an educational OS he created to teach Unix. Naturally, Torvalds immediately decided to install it on his computer. The problem was that the Sinclair QL was not designed to fit such systems. Only in January 1991, having purchased a new computer (now a PC), Torvalds was able to install Minix on it.

After studying the advantages and disadvantages of this operating system, Linus decided to bring it to mind. It was a training OS, stripped down and mangled. Minix has been upgraded with old Linus programs and patches by Bruce Evans, the famous Australian hacker.

Create a terminal emulation package

It all started with the fact that in Minix the remote communication terminal was implemented very poorly. And this was the function that Linus used the most. With the help of it, he contacted the university computer via a modem connection. Torvalds decided to create his own communication program, based not on Minix, but onthe hardware level of the computer itself. Thanks to this, he simultaneously studied a computer on the 386th processor, as well as its OS. Torvalds was very proud that he was able to improve the OS. But attempts to present their merits to others did not lead to anything. It was difficult to explain to people that under the external unpretentiousness one can sometimes find complex deep processes.

Developing a file system driver and disk drive

So Linux started with a terminal emulation package. After that, one innovation followed another. Torvalds needed to download and write files to a computer located at the university. To do this, it was necessary to write them to disk. After thinking, Linus decided to create a file system and disk drive driver. At the same time, the system that he planned to develop had to be compatible with Minix. While creating it, he consulted Minix users via a usenet conference. From the serious questions the student asked about the architecture of Minix and Unix, one could guess that he was planning to develop his own OS.

Working on the first version of Linux

One day, Linus suddenly discovered that the programs written by him, overgrown with many additional features and are a working version of the OS. Work on the creation of Linux in the early stages was fairly monotonous. Torvalds looked at the various system calls that underlie Unix one by one. Based on them, he tried to create his own OS blocks with the functions he needed. It was quite tiring and not very stimulating tocontinuation of work. Linus had to do this because it was not yet possible to test the system's performance. After processing about 25 different system calls, Torvalds switched to a different tactic. Now he started trying to run the OS shell. If errors occurred, he developed the necessary system calls. Progress in the development of the system was evident. The shell began to work stably starting from the end of August 1991. This was Linus' first big success.

Linux 0.01

So, the first version of Linux appeared in the public domain on September 17, 1991. Then Torvalds decided what to call this system. He originally planned to give it the name Freax (the word freaks means "fans" and "x" is the ending for Unix). Even then, he called this system Linux, but considered immodest to use his name as the official name. Helsinki University of Technology lecturer Ari Lemke created a directory on the university's FTP server. This is where Linus placed his system. But Ari did not like the word Freax, so he decided to rename the directory where it was placed to pub/OS/Linux. Torvalds didn't really mind, so the name gradually stuck.

The version of the OS posted on the site had the number 0.01. Thus, it was emphasized that the system is still imperfect and needs serious improvement. Therefore, Torvalds did not publicly demonstrate his OS. He only sent letters to several well-known hackers, which indicated the address of the server where they could download it. Initi althe version didn't allow you to do almost anything except run it and print the sources.

System improvements

Interest in the system dried up from its creator by November 1991. Perhaps its further improvement would have stopped. However, chance intervened. Linus, finalizing once again Minix, spoiled by oversight important parts of the section of this OS. The question arose about whether to reinstall Minix or put Linux as the main OS. Torvalds decided to choose his system.

Linux already by the beginning of 1992 made a big leap forward. Several features were added to the system that had no analogues in Minix. This is, for example, swapping to a hard drive in the case of working with large programs. Linus also introduced features into his system that users requested in their emails. Thus, Linus Torvalds significantly improved his OS.

I'm making a free operating system

The creator of the system refused to offer rewards. He only asked users to send postcards from the cities in which they lived. Linus was interested to know where his system is being used. Postcards began to pour in an avalanche - from Japan, New Zealand, the USA, the Netherlands. Relatives finally noticed that Linus gained great popularity thanks to his computer studies. The fortune of Linus Torvalds today, presumably, is quite impressive. However, he himself takes money calmly. Profit was never in his nature.

Distribution Terms

At first, the conditions for the distribution of the OS were developed only in general terms. Linux was distributed freely, but it could not be put up for sale. If the user decided to make improvements or changes to the system, he had to create the source, making these improvements in the public domain. Linus Torvalds currently uses the General Public License instead of copyright.

Introduction of GUI, Linux 1.0

In the spring of 1992, hacker O. Zbrowski adapted Windows for this OS X. Linux thus has a graphical interface. After that, Linus Torvalds decided that the system was almost ready and released version 0.95. However, this was a mistake. As soon as he began to introduce networking functions into his OS, he realized that it was necessary to significantly refine the system. Only 2 years later, version 1.0 was released, introduced in March 1994

Tux the penguin is Torvalds' personal mascot. Linus Torvalds (Just for Fun) tells about the history of the emblem in his book. In it, he writes that he chose this animal because one day a penguin pecked it at the zoo.

Major achievements and awards

In 1996, Linus Benedikt Torvalds graduated from the university with a master's degree. His daughter was born in December, and in 1997 he began working in Silicon Valley at Transmeta. To date, Linus Torvalds has created only 2% of the system kernel. However, it is he who decides what changes need to be made to the official branch of the OS he developed.

In conclusion, let's talk about the latest awards received by Torvalds. In 2012, together with Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese physician, Linus became the laureate of the prestigious Millennium Technology Award. In the same year, he became a member of the Internet Hall of Fame. Linus Torvalds, whose photo and biography are of interest to many today, is also the owner of the "Computer Pioneer" award, which was presented to him by IEEE in April 2014.