Linus Torvalds Turns 40

Yesterday, Linux Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, turned 40. While birthdays for the most part aren’t too important for someone other than whose birthday it is, this one is special for a couple of reasons. It was 19 years ago that Linus took all of his Christmas and birthday money, and spent it on a PC in order to focus on programming and create some cool things.

The computer was a Sinclair QL, first released in 1984 and discontinued a mere two years later. The processor was based on Motorola’s 68008, clocked at 7.5MHz, and the basic model featured 128KB of memory. In lieu of floppy disks, the QL used a proprietary format called the Microdrive, which had cartridges capable of holding 85KB of data. The interesting thing I find is that the storage on the disk almost matches the system memory, and the true could be said today, where a DVD holds 4.5GB of data, and many home PC’s have 4GB of memory.

But I digress. According to Linux Journal, Linus purchased this computer knowing it had a few limitations due to the fact that it had multi-tasking abilities, which believe it or not, was more of a luxury back then. But, it was with this system that kick-started his programming, and today, the Linux kernel is used in close to 90% of the world’s supercomputers, on many desktops and netbooks, and it’s even starting to see some growth in the mobile device segment.

It would be interesting to picture just what Linus was thinking about when he purchased that computer, and follow-up machines. Did he realize he was going to create something that would affect the world so greatly? It’s hard to imagine that anyone could predict something like that, but I for one am very glad things worked out as they have. Huge thanks, Linus!

By mid-summer -91, “Linux” was able to read the disk (joyful moment), and eventually had a small and stupid disk driver and a simple buffer cache. So I started out trying to make a filesystem, and used the Minix fs for simple practical reasons: that way I already had a file layout I could test things on. After some more programming (talk about glossing things over), I had a very simple UNIX that had some of the basic functionalities of the real thing: I could run small test-programs under it.