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