It Started With One Man and the Internet

When Linus Torvalds bought his first personal computer in 1991 at age 21, he didn’t like the Microsoft DOS software that came with the machine. He wanted something more powerful, like the Unix systems he was using as a second-year computer science student at the University of Helsinki.

So Torvalds decided to write his own operating system. “I just wanted something good enough for me,” he said.

If he had left it at that, Torvalds would have been just another hacker with his own jerry-built operating system. Instead, the young Finn is an icon among programmers.

What transformed Torvalds from hacker to hero was his effective use of the Internet to get thousands of programmers around the world to use and improve his software.

“Linux was the first child operating system of the Internet,” said John Hall, head of Linux International, a group that promotes the software.

In October 1991, Torvalds began the process by sending his rough software system to five friends on the Net. “I was proud of it,” Torvalds said. “Hey, what a cool project. I wanted to show off.”

His friends were encouraging. Some made suggestions for changes. One friend offered to make his software available on a university Internet site and named it Linux, vetoing the name Torvalds had chosen: Freax.

With the software available to hundreds of programmers, Torvalds started receiving messages from strangers with suggestions, many including patches of code, on how to improve the system.

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To encourage the process, Torvalds used a licensing system developed by free software pioneer Richard Stallman that required anybody who made improvements on Linux to make the code available to everybody else for free.

By 1994, when Torvalds felt confident enough to consider it a complete operating system, 100,000 people had already downloaded it and were using it on their personal computers.

Torvalds succeeded in building momentum behind his effort because he regarded all other programmers as his peers, said Phil Hughes, publisher of Linux Journal. Stallman, who launched a similar effort, failed, Hughes said, because “he tried to control things too much.”

Torvalds’ interest in computers goes back to age 11, when his grandfather, a mathematician and statistician, bought a small computer and taught him to write simple programs.

“I liked the challenge of making a computer do what you wanted it to,” said Torvalds, who spent much of his childhood designing simple games. “I was a geek.”

Torvalds still collaborates with a core group of 10 to keep advancing the capabilities of Linux. But while his role has brought him hero status among hackers, Torvalds has yet to make any money off his namesake software.

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He said Linux would never have succeeded if he had tried to sell it, so he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I’ve been so happy with what happened to Linux,” Torvalds said. “It has been an incredible experience.”

Last year Torvalds left Finland and came to Silicon Valley to work at Transmeta, a secretive Silicon Valley chip design start-up partially funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, which he hopes will make him his fortune.

Torvalds doesn’t know if Linux will ever manage to unseat Windows as the world standard. But he believes somebody will because of Microsoft’s tendency to focus on marketing at the expense of technical excellence.

“Microsoft will survive, but eventually they won’t drive the market anymore,” Torvalds said. “They’re not fast enough and agile enough.”