Linus Torvalds

@Software Engineer, Birthday and Life

Linus Torvalds is the software engineer who created the Linux kernel operating system

Dec 28, 1969

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Biography

Personal Details

  • Birthday: December 28, 1969
  • Nationality: Finns, American
  • Famous: Software Engineer, Atheists, Engineers, Computer Engineers
  • Spouses: Tove Torvalds
  • Siblings: Tove Torvalds
  • Known as: Linus Benedict Torvalds
  • Universities:
    • University of Helsinki

Linus Torvalds born at

Helsinki

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Birth Place

He is married to Tove Monni, a karate champion. The couple has three daughters.

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Personal Life

He calls himself an atheist. He is completely irreligious and believes that religion should be a personal choice and not a political issue.

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Personal Life

In 2010, he became a citizen of the United States of America.

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Personal Life

Linus Benedict Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. His parents are Anna and Nils Torvalds, both of whom are journalists. He is the grandson of the Finnish-Swedish journalist and poet, Ole Torvalds.

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Childhood & Early Life

Between 1988 and 1996, he studied at the University of Helsinki, from where he obtained a master’s degree in computer science. He belonged to the NODES research group.

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Childhood & Early Life

During his period of study, he became a part of the Finnish Army and attended an eleven month training programme in order to meet the compulsory military service criteria of Finland. This interrupted his studies.

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Childhood & Early Life

While in the army, he reached the position of a second lieutenant. In 1990, he went back to university to continue his studies. It was during this time that he got acquainted with the operating system, ‘Unix’.

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Childhood & Early Life

He wrote his Master’s thesis on ‘Linux: A Portable Operating System'. He became fascinated and deeply interested in computer science after he worked on the 8-bit home computer, VIC-20.

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Childhood & Early Life

In 1991, he purchased the Intel 80386-based IBM PC and obtained a MINIX operating system. With this, he began to work and research on the Linux operating system.

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Career

In 1996, he went on a visit to the technology firm, ‘Transmeta’, where he began to work from the following year. He later worked for the Open Source Development Labs.

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Career

From 1997 to 1999, he worked on the '86open' project, which is a binary file format for the ‘Unix’ and Unix-like operating systems. They were to be used on a common x86 PC.

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Career

In 1999, he was offered stock options for his creation by the companies, Red Hat and VA Linux. That very year, the stock prices increased to about $20 million after the companies went public.

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Career

In June 2004, along with his family, he relocated to Beaverton, Oregon, where Open Source Development Labs was headquartered. The following year, he developed the software, ‘Git’.

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Career

He is the founder and the creator of the new operating system ‘Linux’, which was released in 1991. This Linux kernel is one of the most significant free and open source software.

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Major Works