Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds grew up in Helsinki in a Swedish-speaking family and got his start on his grandfather's Commodore VIC-20 at the age of 11, typing in programs from magazines. He was, by his own account, an unremarkable, awkward student who liked computers better than people.

In January 1991, as a university student, he spent his savings on a PC with an Intel 386 chip. The operating system that came with it did not let him do what he wanted, so he began writing his own, at first just to explore the hardware. On 25 August 1991 he posted to a newsgroup that he was working on a free operating system, "just a hobby, won't be big and professional", and asked what features people wanted. He released the code a few weeks later.

What made it different was not the code but the decision to give it away and accept improvements from anyone. Within a couple of years hundreds of programmers were contributing. Torvalds acted as final judge on what went in, a role he still holds three decades later, though his bluntness on mailing lists has drawn criticism and, in 2018, a public apology.

In 2005 he wrote a second tool, Git, in a matter of weeks, to manage the flood of contributions. It became the standard way software is developed everywhere. Linux itself runs Android phones, nearly all the top supercomputers and most of the internet.