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The son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds and the grandson of statistician Leo Törnqvist and of poet Ole Torvalds made his debut in Finland (Wikipedia). Image source: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=78214&picture=baby-boy-birth-announcement -
A group of people led by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed the Unix operating system and presented it to the world during the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (Seng 188). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ken_Thompson_(sitting)_and_Dennis_Ritchie_at_PDP-11_(2876612463).jpg. -
At the age of 11, Torvalds began programming in Basic on a Commodore VIC-20 given to him by his grandfather (Isaacson, 373-374). Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20#/media/File:Commodore-VIC-20-FL.jpg. -
Richard Stallman becomes disillusioned with the "selfishness" of software entrepreneurs and in 1982 begins to formulate the idea that would eventually be termed "copyleft" and result in the "general public license" (Isaacson 372-373). This development would become key to the eventual success of Linux, even though Stallman and Torvalds would always have different opinions on intent (Isaacson 380). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copyleft_Grey.png. -
Eventually graduating with a master's degree in computer science from the NODES research group (Wikipedia). Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Suomi100_University_of_Helsinki_main_building_4.jpg. -
Not being impressed with the OS on the machine, Torvalds looks for options to install the UNIX OS he had worked on in college, eventually settling for a MINIX license he would then customize (Isaacson 374). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ordinateur_table_1990.svg. -
In the late spring of 1991, he wrote the program in assembly language so it wouldn't ultimately need to depend upon MINIX. This new program allowed him to connect to the university's mainframe (Isaacson 374). Image source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/89/Antu_x-terminal-emulator.svg/512px-Antu_x-terminal-emulator.svg.png. -
Over the course of the summer of 1991, Torvalds continued working on his modifications. At some point in the progress, he realized it was becoming a full-blown OS, and in the fall, he emerged from his programming blitz with a system shell containing 10,000 lines of code (Isaacson 375). Image source: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-jtfgt. -
Torvalds posts a message on the MINIX discussion newsgroup that leads to the initial foray into open-source development, "Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, where men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" (Isaacson 376). Torvalds also launches the first Linux mailing list (Seng 182). Image source: https://freesvg.org/mailinglist. -
From November 1991 through July 1995, Torvalds would successfully oversee an open-source project with more than 15,000 contributors (Seng 186). Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/linuxfoundation/49655401876. -
In 1993, Red Hat stepped in to make Linux more accessible (Red Hat). As Seng notes, this was a critical development for people who struggled with a "do-it-yourself installation". Organization like Red Hat, Suse, Caldera, and Debian, introduce a model of selling and supporting low-cost versions of Linux that were ready to deploy (188). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Language_Summit,_Redhat_Pune.jpg. -
This version offered most features of a typical Unix OS and contained about 175,000 lines of code (Seng 182). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_Gnu_Linux_1.0_CD_Flipped.png. -
Torvalds begins to publicly acknowledge the developers coding the Linux kernel (Seng 182). Image source: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-iuvtz. -
This critical early decision likely led to wider adoption. Torvalds decided that relatively stable releases would be even numbered and would focus only on bug fixes, and odd numbers denoted the development versions (Seng 187). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_Collage_Linux_Distro.png. -
While there is no real known reason for the penguin to be named TUX, one suggestion is that it is a way to reference "(T)orvalds (U)ni(X)." Stories abound that the reason for the penguin as a Linux mascot stems from Torvalds being bitten by one when he was young (Wikipedia). Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_(mascot)#/media/File:Tux,_gray%EF%BC%8Fgrey_background.png. -
This version added 64-bit processing, multiprocessing, and advanced networking, and it contained about 780,000 lines of code (Seng 182). Image source: https://www.explainthatstuff.com/howcomputernetworkswork.html. -
Torvalds begins to publicly acknowledge developers helping to maintain the Linux kernel (Seng 183). Image source: https://pix4free.org/photo/12973/maintenance.html. -
Seng notes that in December 1998, "more than 8 million users were running Linux on a wide variety of platforms" and the OS was growing at 25 percent, "two and a half times greater than the rest of the market." (186). Image source: https://www.maxpixel.net/Network-Continents-Web-Networking-Global-6225156. -
Seng notes that by July 2000, Linux user groups exceeded 400 and spanned 71 countries. This level of collaboration also helped take care of administrative tasks that many developers loathe by having approximately 300 people contribute over 20 megabytes of documentation spanning all the way up to full-scale manuals (188). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_lite_3-help_manual.png. -
In a true nod to social relevance, Linus's LEGO minifig is posted on Flickr. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/134671996. -
Awarded (along with Shinya Yamanaka) by the Technology Academy Finland (Wikipedia). Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Technology_Prize#/media/File:Millennium_Technology_Prize_logo.gif. -
By IEEE Computer Society (PR Newswire). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IEEE_Computer_Society_headquarters_DC.JPG. -
By IEEE Masaru Ibuka (Wikipedia). Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-Torvalds_IEEE_Ibuka_Award_2018.jpg. -
By Kaycie Drennan, for ESOC 210 -
Complete citations
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