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Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland to Nils and Anna Torvalds
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Linus first interacted with a computer and sparked his future career when he bought a Commodore VIC-20 and began exploring it at only 11 years old.
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Finland requires every citizen to serve time in the Finnish military, and Linus' time came during college, interrupting him after his first year of college. He held the rank of Second Lieutenant.
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Linus was brought along to a Richard Stallman speech by a Computer Science student where Linus learned about GNU and it's general public license, which he subsequently used when creating Linux.
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The second upgrade of Linus' hardware came in along with his copy of the MINIX OS, allowing him to officially begin development of Linux.
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Linus released the first version of the Linux kernel, releasing it on kernel.org
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Linus earned his Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki in 1996, with his MSc being Link titled, "Linux: A Portable Operating System"
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Linus visited Transmeta, a microprocessor manufacturing and development company in late 1996 and soon took up a position after becoming interested in their research.
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Torvalds was named by MIT Tech Review as one of the top 100 innovators under 35.
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In 2003, Linus left Transmeta to work exclusively on Linux and joined the team at Open Source Development Labs, which later became the Linux Foundation, where he continues to work under their auspices.
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Linus and his family moved to Dunthorpe, Oregon to be closer to the headquarters of his current employer, Open Source Development Labs
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Linus finally became a US citizen and registered to vote - despite his insistent rejection of political associations.
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After taking a break from kernel development, Linus started on a brand new project stemming from a passion for SCUBA diving, a logging program called Subsurface. Lead development was taken over a year later by Dirk Hohndel.
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Torvalds earned the Millennium Technology Prize in 2012, an award widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of technology.
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Torvalds was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame at the inaugural Internet Society conference in Geneva, Switzerland, one of only 33 inductees for that year.
