Linus Torvalds -- One of the Greatest Men Alive?

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"Being 39 years of age, Linus Torvalds was born on the 28th of December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. Though the fact that he graduated the Helsinki University with a Master's degree in computer science may not seem very interesting, you should know that the University's decision to hold a UNIX course during his years there was one of the things that led to the creation of Linux.

"The course convinced Linus that UNIX was the best operating system out there and made him frantically look for a copy. Not having any luck, he eventually had to buy a cheap, standard 386 architecture PC that had MINIX pre-installed. Being a newsgroup addict, Linus hated MINIX's poor terminal emulation, a must for news reading, and wanted to write a new terminal emulation package. In the meantime, getting his hands on a book that covered all of 386's new exciting features (memory management, paging, segmentation, task switching, etc.), Linus was eager to test out every capability for himself, mainly for self-teaching purposes."

Complete Story

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