{"id":255245,"date":"2026-05-20T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/linus-torvalds-biography-linux-facts\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T17:01:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T21:01:47","slug":"linus-torvalds-biography-linux-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/linus-torvalds-biography-linux-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"Linus Torvalds | Biography, Linux, &#038; Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Linus-Torvalds\">Linus Torvalds | Biography, Linux, &#038; Facts<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Linus-Torvalds\">https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Linus-Torvalds<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-20 01:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.britannica.com\">www.britannica.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"marker PREMOD1 mod-inline\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"topic-paragraph\"><strong><span id=\"ref1023783\"\/>Linus Torvalds<\/strong> (born December 28, 1969, Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish computer scientist who was the principal force behind the development of the <span id=\"ref1025829\"\/>Linux operating system.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"marker MOD1 mod-inline\"\/><span class=\"marker PREMOD2 mod-inline\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"topic-paragraph\">At age 10 Torvalds began to dabble in computer programming on his grandfather\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s computers. Consequently, he decided to create his own PC-based version of UNIX.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"marker MOD2 mod-inline\"\/><span class=\"marker PREMOD3 mod-inline\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"topic-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n<p>Britannica Quiz<\/p>\n<p>Computers and Technology Quiz<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"marker MOD3 mod-inline\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Teaching Insults<\/p>\n<p class=\"topic-paragraph\">The computer science professor Megan Squire used Torvalds\u2019s emails as an example in order to train a program to recognize insults.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"marker PREMOD4 mod-inline\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"topic-paragraph\">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&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Linus-Torvalds\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Linus Torvalds | Biography, Linux, &#038; Facts https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Linus-Torvalds Publish Date: 2026-05-20 01:00:00 Source Domain: www.britannica.com&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":255246,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cdn.britannica.com\/99\/124299-050-4B4D509F\/Linus-Torvalds-2012.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71],"class_list":["post-255245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255247,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255245\/revisions\/255247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}