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Born in Helsinki, Finland.
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In 1981, 11 year old Linus future with computers was sparked with the Commodore VIC-20. He went on to modify a Sinclair QL extensively, writing his own assembler and editor for the QL due to the difficulty accessing software for it in Finland. He wrote a version of Pac-Man he called Cool Man. (History of Linux)
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A small clone of UNIX created by Andrew Tanenbaum to teach UNIX to students.
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In the summer of 1989, fulfilling Finland's mandatory military service through an 11-month officer training program, Linus read 'Operating Systems: Design and Implementation', Linus's first introduction to MINIX (a simplified Unix), as described by Tenebaum. When he resumed his studies in 1990, he was exposed to UNIX. He then wrote his thesis, titled: Linux: A Portable Operating System.
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While at University, Linus disliked the limited licensing of MINIX, which only allowed for educational use. He decided to work on his own operating system kernel. He sought to develop software that was portable and useful (Torvalds 1).
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The project's makefiles inlcuded the name Freax, which had to be uploaded to the FTP server of FUNET in september 1991. A Coworker of Tovald's, Ari Lemmke, was a volunteer administrator for the FTP server and disliked the name Freax. He changed the project name to Linux without consulting Linus. (History of Linux)
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GNU project was announced by Richard Stallman in 1983 as a free software, mass cooperative project. Linus listened to a speech made by Stallman, which motivated him to later use GNU General Public License version 2 for his Linux kernel.
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The 33MHz Intel 386 processor and 4MB of memory attributed to the computer greatly appealed to Linus, but her was disappointed by the MS-DOS operating system it came with. He much preferred the UNIX operating systems of the university computers.
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(Seng 190) He announced the project in a Usenet newsgroup of Minix users: Hello everybody out there using minix -
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready"- Linus Torvalds (Seng 192) -
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(Seng 187)
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https://youtu.be/4XpnKHJAok8 (Seng 187)
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Linus accepts a position at Transmeta, a semiconductor company, where he works until 2003.
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MIT Technology Review TR100 names Tovalds as one of the world's top 100 innovators under the age of 35
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Red Hat and VA Linux, leading developers of Linux-based software, gifted Tovalds with stock options to thank him for his creation.
