Father of Linux Operating System: Who is Linus Torvalds?

Linus Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969 in Finland.

He started his education at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki in 1988.

During his university education, he bought an IBM PC with an Intel-80386 processor. This computer had the Minix operating system. He began to develop features in Minix that he did not like, on his own.

Linus Benedict Torvalds (born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions like Debian, Arch and Android. He also created the distributed version control system Git.

While fixing the bugs on this Minix, he made a radical decision and started writing his own operating system. This operating system, which he initially named Freax, later became Linux upon the suggestion of Ari Lemke, whom he knew from the University and who helped him.

Torvalds, who made a mistake while developing Linux, deleted the entire Minix operating system on the computer. All he had left was his own operating system. He made another radical decision and continued to develop his own operating system instead of reinstalling Minix on his computer.

Only a year after this incident, many people who used Minix had now switched to Linux.

Linux, which is still widely used today, is Linus Torvalds' greatest achievement.

Interest in Computers and Educational Life

Linus' interest in computers began at an early age. He was introduced to computers with the Commodore VIC-20 when he was only 11 years old and started coding in BASIC at that age. 6 years later, a Sinclair QL was purchased for his home. However, since it was very difficult to buy software in Finland, he developed his own Assembler and editor.

He started at the Helsinki Department of Computer Science in 1988, but in his first year, he was forced to enter the Finnish Military Corps as a lieutenant and had to take a break from his education during this period. When he started his education again, he bought Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems book. In this book, Tanenbaum introduced MINIX, the version of UNIX created for education, and this attracted Linus's attention.

In 1991, Linus bought himself an IBM PC with a new Intel-80386 processor with the money he saved, and when he could not afford the UNIX he wanted to use, he decided to use MINIX on his computer. After a while, Linus was disturbed by MINIX and gradually made changes to MINIX. However, thinking that the operating system was inadequate, Linus decided to lock himself in his room during a summer vacation and work on Linux. After much effort, he created a prototype, but the system he created still contained errors and was not very useful. He shared the prototype with everyone to improve it, and within a few months, he received many suggestions for corrections and implemented them.

At first, he thought of calling this operating system Linux (Linus' MINIX), but then he gave up and decided to name the operating system Freax. Since a friend of Linus's who was an administrator on the FTP server used the name Linux in the system, the name of the operating system remained Linux.