"Cox was born in Solihull, and studied at universities in Wales.
He was a keen Amiga hacker, and contemplated writing an entirely
new operating system for that machine, but decided that "writing
file system stuff was too hard for one person to do." So he was
naturally impressed to discover that a crazy Finn had done
precisely that, as he learned through following the Minix
newsgroups where Linus made his early announcements. Cox began
hacking on version 0.11 of the kernel, and was soon involved in one
of the most important projects of the nascent operating system:
getting the networking sorted out.
"After this crucial contribution, Cox effectively became Number
2 in the Linux kernel devlopment team. As such, he was a natural
candidate for Red Hat when the company started making hackers
offers they couldn't refuse."