Linus Torvalds | Biography, Linux, & Facts

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Linus-Torvalds

Publish Date: 2026-05-20 01:00:00

Linus Torvalds (born December 28, 1969, Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish computer scientist who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux operating system.

At age 10 Torvalds began to dabble in computer programming on his grandfather’s Commodore VIC-20. In 1991 while a computer science student at the University of Helsinki (M.S., 1996), he purchased his first personal computer (PC). He was not satisfied, however, with the computer’s operating system (OS). His PC used MS-DOS (the disk operating system from Microsoft), but Torvalds preferred the UNIX operating system he had used on the university’s computers. Consequently, he decided to create his own PC-based version of UNIX.

Months of determined programming work yielded the beginnings of an operating system known as Linux. In 1991 Torvalds posted a message on the Internet to alert other PC users to his new system, made the software available as a free download, and, as was a common practice among software developers at the time, released the source code, which meant that anyone with knowledge of computer programming could modify Linux to suit their own purposes. Because of their access to the source code, many programmers helped Torvalds retool and refine the software, and by 1994 Linux kernel (original code) version 1.0 had been released.

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Teaching Insults

The computer science professor Megan Squire used Torvalds’s emails as an example in order to train a program to recognize insults.

Although Torvalds purposely made Linux open source, he would send abusive emails to those who made changes he disagreed with. Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University, stated in a 2018 interview in The New Yorker that the emails may have contributed to the male-dominated Linux development community, as women may have found receiving the insulting messages to be more…

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