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Linus Benedict Tovalds is Born
Linus was born in Helsinki, Finland -
Interest in Computers Discovered
Discovers interest in compters with the Commodore VIC-20 computer at age 11. -
Begins Education
Linus began his education at the University of Helsinki -
Education Interrupted
As per the Finnish military laws, Linus had to join the military, opting for an 11 month officer training course. He would achieve the rank of second lieutenant, as a ballistic calculations officer. -
The Breadcrumbs
On January 5th, 1991, Linus bought an Intel 80836-based IBM clone computer, then a copy of MINIX, which allowed he to begin work on Linux. -
Discovery of GNU
In 1991, Linus meets Lars Wirzenius who takes him to a speech by Richard Stallman. This is where Linus discovered the GNU GPL which would be used to release Linux to the public. -
First Version of Linux
On September 17th, 1991, the first verison of Linux was released online. -
Version 1.0 of Linux Released
The official Version 1.0 of Linux was released on March 14th, 1994 -
Graduates College
Linus graduated in 1996 with a Masters Degree in Computer Science -
Linus Gets a Job
In 1996, Linus visited Transmeta, and got a job there. The company would go through mergers and changes to ultimately become the Linux Foundation. Linus is sponsored by the Linux Foundation to work full time on Linux. -
MIT Technology Review Honor
In 1999, the MIT Technology Review named Linus as one of the world's top 100 innvoators under age 35. -
Rewards for Linux
In 1999, the companies Red Hat and VA Linux gave Linus stock options because of his creation (they were both Linux based companies). -
Linus' Law
In the book "Cathedral and the Bazzar", the author describes a law he calls "Linus' Law", wherein, if you have enough people debugging code, there will be at least one person who can spot and fix the bug. This was in response to the open source model of Linux. -
Linus Moves to the USA
Linus moved his family to Oregon to be closer to the Linux Foundation headquarters. -
Linus creates Git
Due to controversy for using a proprietary version control software for Linux, Linus developed an open source version control software for Linux called Git. It was also release under the GNU GPL.
