Linus Torvalds grew up with his sister, parents, and maternal grandfather; he lived around Helsinki until after he graduated from the University. His own description of his childhood foreshadows the career of a remarkably talented computer scientist; he was addicted to computers after being exposed to his grandfather’s PC, and rarely wasted time away from the screen. In many ways, he resembled the typical stereotype of an adolescent nerd (or geek? I guess there’s a difference); sports were not his strong suit, he didn’t particularly care for any sort of a sex life, and most of all, he accepted this lifestyle happily. Being in front of the computer was what made him high. Based on his detailed recollection, many can likely relate to what this high feels like, but few could understand how he got it from chugging away on the expensive, electronic pieces of junk of the day.
It’s obvious that his upbringing obeys Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule (it’s actually Green’s 10,000 hour rule, but many more learned it from Gladwell). When you spend a monumental time in a single sphere, you become a master in it. Not a metaphoric master, or a master in the shallow colloquial sense, but a true, unexaggerated master. The kind of expert who is the best in the world at some facet of the sphere. Green talks about how Bill Gates and Bill Joy owe all their success outside luck to the uncountable moments spent in front of the computer screen. Of all the heuristics I’ve ever come to learn, the 10,000 hour rule has been one of the most consistent laws of life. I suspect there are many masters out there who never receive the recognition they probably deserve for their mastery simply because they don’t care, but they are no doubt masters. Ironically, Linus is one of those guys who didn’t care. His interviews reveal that he never felt any gravity from money, but his creation happened to churn a ridiculous following that could not be ignored.
His motivation is evident in several memories he discloses. He had (and still has) a wonderful knack for taking things apart and putting them back together. In fact, he makes the sound argument that people were likely better off on less capable, but less complex machines that they could tinker with. On his second computer – the Sinclair QL – he programmed video games and wrote scripts, but also poked at the OS. He used a disassembler to semi-decipher the machine language of the OS on the machine; we certainly take for granted the simplicity involved in reading open source code. He found flaws, and became frustrated that the OS was written in ROM as it inhibited him from really changing the components under the hood. Perhaps this passion stayed with him. The ultimate catalyst that brought him above the threshold of deciding to write linux, however, was a discovery from an OS textbook. He learned of minux, a clone of unix, which would eventually provide the initial scaffolding for his remarkable creation. Around the same time, he became familiar with the “Open source God”, Richard Stallman, thus driving him to use Stallman’s GPL license for linux.
Personally, I regret to share that my itches are not as clear as Linus’s. I do believe I will achieve mastery like him, and I understand exactly the type of high he felt when being in front of his computer. I jumped on the boat a little bit late, and I’m still exploring all of the crazy avenues that one can go down in computer science. I’ve cast a wide and shallow net, with big interests in data-science, artificial intelligence, functional programming, image processing, web development, and just about everything in between. I’m confident that I’ll know what my exact calling is in the time up ahead.
jackconsidine 