Linus Torvalds wanted to call it Freax until a friend picked Linux
In 1991 a Helsinki student posted a hobby operating system kernel on his university's FTP server. He wanted to call it Freax; the friend who ran the server named the folder linux instead. Linus Torvalds still steers that kernel, and when he needed better tools to manage it, he wrote Git in 2005.
Torvalds was born in Helsinki on 28 December 1969 into the country's Swedish-speaking minority; his parents were journalists and one-time campus radicals. He was named after the chemist Linus Pauling, though he has joked that the Peanuts character deserves equal credit. At 11 he got a Commodore VIC-20 and soon wrote machine code for its processor directly. Next came a Sinclair QL, whose operating system he modified heavily; software was scarce in Finland, so he wrote his own assembler and a Pac-Man clone called Cool Man.
He studied at the University of Helsinki from 1988, breaking off for 11 months of officer training with the Finnish Navy's Nyland Brigade, where he became a second lieutenant and artillery observer. Back at university he met Unix and read Andrew Tanenbaum's textbook on MINIX, a teaching version of it. On 5 January 1991 he bought a 386 PC clone and started writing his own kernel. Hearing Richard Stallman speak that autumn helped persuade him to drop his original no-commercial-use licence for the GNU General Public License. Version 1.0 appeared on 14 March 1994.
Even the tools grew from friction. Criticised for managing the kernel with the proprietary BitKeeper system, he began writing Git on 3 April 2005 and handed it to Junio Hamano within months. He later started Subsurface, free software for logging scuba dives. In 2000 he turned down Steve Jobs's invitation to work on Apple's operating system. He worked at Transmeta in California from 1997 to 2003, and the Linux Foundation now pays him to work on Linux full time.
His bluntness on the kernel mailing list is notorious, and in 2018, as a new code of conduct arrived, he publicly apologised for his behaviour. He met his wife Tove, a six-time Finnish karate champion, when she answered a test email in his computer lab with a request for a date. Their daughters' birth dates, in hexadecimal, serve as magic numbers in the kernel's reboot call. He became an American citizen in 2010.
Source: Linus Torvalds
