Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...
. He also created the
distributed version control system
Git.
He was honored, along with
Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012
Millennium Technology Prize by the
Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new
open source operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
for
computer
A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...
s leading to the widely used Linux
kernel". He is also the recipient of the 2014
IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award and the 2018
IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award.
Life and career
Early years
Torvalds was born in
Helsinki
Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...
, Finland, on 28 December 1969, the son of journalists Anna and
Nils Torvalds, the grandson of statistician
Leo Törnqvist and of poet
Ole Torvalds, and the great-grandson of journalist and soldier
Toivo Karanko. His parents were campus radicals at the
University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the
Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. He was named after
Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize–winning American chemist, although in the book ''
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution'', he is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for
Linus the
Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this made him "half Nobel Prize–winning chemist and half blanket-carrying cartoon character".
His interest in computers began with a
VIC-20 at the age of 11 in 1981. He started programming for it in
BASIC
Basic or BASIC may refer to:
Science and technology
* BASIC, a computer programming language
* Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base
* Basic access authentication, in HTTP
Entertainment
* Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film
...
, then later by directly accessing the
6502 CPU in
machine code (he did not utilize
assembly language). He then purchased a
Sinclair QL, which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. "Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland", he wrote his own assembler and
editor "(in addition to
Pac-Man graphics libraries)" for the QL, and a few games. He wrote a ''
Pac-Man'' clone, ''Cool Man''.
Torvalds attended the
University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996,