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Just for Fun

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Just for Fun

The Story of an Accidental Revolution

Thomson Texere,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Linus Torvalds used his passion for programming to create the revolutionary Linux operating system.

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Background
  • Concrete Examples
  • Insider's Take

Recommendation

Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the Linux operating system, mixes his personal story, told in both narrative and e-mail dispatches, with the saga of his development of the Linux operating system. Torvalds’ personal account makes the book fascinating. He began as a self-proclaimed nerd (and even a jerk) who labored to create an operating system in his garage and eventually became the head of the world’s largest open source project. By requiring buyers and licensees to keep the Linux source code open, Torvalds assures the continued technological evolution of his system. The episodic nature of the book makes it choppy, the technical descriptions are hard for the uninitiated to track and co-writer David Diamond’s digressions are revealing about Torvalds’ personal life, but a little disruptive. This entertaining, interesting book may even lead you to consider using Linux on your computer, whether or not you are another self-proclaimed computer nerd.

Summary

Torvalds the Computer Nerd

Linus Torvalds was born in Finland into a family of Swedish descent. A “beaverish runt” and a “nerd,” he wore glasses, and had bad hair and clothing. He was good at math and physics, but sadly lacked social graces. He was fascinated with his grandfather’s calculator, until, in 1981, his grandfather brought the first computer Torvalds had ever seen into their small home. It was a very rudimentary Commodore VIC-20. Although it was an early generation machine, no assembly was necessary. The boy and his grandfather just connected it to a television set and turned it on. Despite its limited memory and capacity, Torvalds started working passionately with the new computer. To get it to do anything, his grandfather had to program it in BASIC; soon, Torvalds was also writing programs.

As a teenager, rather than participating in other activities, he focused his attention on this computer almost exclusively. He soon found that its operating system involved a much simpler language than BASIC - machine language - which he began to use. He loved the exhilarating sense of control he felt as he pushed the computer to do more and to be faster. His only teen...

About the Authors

Linus Torvalds was born in Finland and graduated from the University of Helsinki. He created the Linux operating system and is currently a programmer at Transmeta. David Diamond has written for The New York Times, Wired, USA Today, BusinessWeek and many other publications

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