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Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland to Anna and Nils Torvalds, who were both journalists that attended the same university he did, the University of Helsinki.
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He begins to dabble in programming at the age of 11 on his grandfather's Commodore VIC-20, using BASIC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuAebQvFnRI (Link to interview where this is mentioned)
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Began pursuing his degree in Computer Science.
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Torvalds attends Stallman's speech about his GNU project at the University of Technology. This would eventually lead to him using it to license Linux.
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Purchased this computer and received his copy of MINIX, which set him on the path to begin working on Linux.
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Torvalds announces that he plans to create a UNIX-inspired operating system called Linux, and begins working on it. This was the first major internet-centered open-source project.
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Linux is licensed under GNU GPL and the first distributions of it are created
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Over 100 developers begin working on the Linux kernel, adapting it to the GNU environment.
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Torvalds deems Linux and its components to be ready for release and releases version 1.0 of Linux.
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After years of not officially declaring themselves as a community, the group of people who believed in open-source recognized themselves as a community, which can be accredited to Torvalds for encouraging contributions from all.
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He graduated with a masters in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki.
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The 2.0 version of Linux is released, increasing its appeal to many companies because of its capability of using multiple processors at the same time by using Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP).
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IBM, Compaq, Oracle, and other companies announce that they will support Linux.
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Major cosmetic change. Storage backend for Xen is added, and multiple changes are made to Btrfs filesystem and to graphics drivers, among other changes.
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Along with Shinya Yamanaka, a stem cell scientist, he is awarded the Millennium Technology Prize and 600,000 euros.
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Support for live patching kernel code is added. DAX, Kasan, and lazytime added. New drivers and other small improvements.
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Support for energy-aware scheduling added. Adiantum file system encryption is added for lower-power devices. AMD Freesync is supported (among other new features)
