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Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. Both of his parents were journalists. His father was in the Communist Party, and his mother was a radical. Despite his upbringing, Linus Torvalds was more interested in technology than in politics.
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At age 11, he received a used Commodore VIC 20, a personal computer from his grandfather, a statistics professor at the University of Helsinki. He started writing programs in BASIC, and then learned other assembly languages.
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He bought a Sinclair QL, one of the world's first 32-bit computers for home use. However, this computer could not be programmed because its operating system was in ROM. Torvalds was not happy.
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Torvalds enrolled in the University of Helsinki, and majored in computer science.
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In this year he learned C programming language, which he later used to write the Linux kernel.
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He bought another personal computer, but he disliked the operating system. He preferred the UNIX system, which was run on the university's computers. He tried to install a version of UNIX, but found it too expensive. He also considered MINIX, but found that not all of its source code was public.
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On August 25, 1991, he posted an announcement on the MINIX newsgroup asking for people's opinions on MINIX. He started to build an operating system based on UNIX and MINIX, and would like to see what people liked and disliked about the existing system.
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Linus Torvalds finished version 0.01 of his new operating system Linux.
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On October 5, the birth of version 0.02 of Linux, the first official version, was announced. Linus Torvalds released Linux under the GNU General Public License, allowing it to be freely used and modified by any programmer.
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Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel, the more usable version, was released.
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Linus Torvalds released version 2.0 of the Linux kernel in December 1996. "This milestone version represented a major improvement in performance through its addition of support for additional processors and for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), which lets multiple processors access and be equally close to all RAM locations (The Linux Information Project)."
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By 1997, it was estimated that at least 3 million computers were using Linux. In 1999, the number grew to 7 million.
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In 1997 he moved to California, after accepting a position with Transmeta Corporation. He worked there for eight years, developing commercial softwares. Meanwhile, he still spent time working on Linux.
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Until 1999, Linux had not bring any major financial gain to its creator. In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux (now VA Software), companies that developed software packages based on Linux, gave Linus Torvalds stock shares. Torvalds became a millionaire after Red Hat went public.
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In 2003, Linus Torvalds started working for Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), a company in Oregon. He worked on Linux full time. In 2006, OSDL merged with Linux Standard Base, and was renamed the Linux Foundation. Linus Torvalds still works there.
