Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

by Linus Benedict Torvalds

  Farfar died five years ago.

  Okay: I’ve never read any of his books. It’s a fact that my father points out to total strangers.

  Journalists are everywhere in my family. Legend has it that one of my great-grandfathers, Ernst von Wendt, was a journalist and novelist who was on the White side and arrested by the Reds during the Finnish Civil War that followed our independence from Russia in 1917. (Okay. I never read his books, either, and am told I’m not missing much.) My father, Nils (known to everyone as Nicke), is a television and radio journalist who was active in the Communist Party since he was a college student in the 1960s. He developed his political leanings when he learned about some of the atrocities committed against communist sympathizers in Finland. Decades later he admits that his enthusiasm for communism may have been born out of naivete. He met my mother Anna (known as Mikke) when they were both rebellious university students in the 1960s. His story is that they were on an outing for a club of Swedish-speaking students, of which he was president. He had a rival for my mother’s attention, and as they were preparing for the return bus trip to Helsinki, he instructed the rival to oversee the loading of the bus. He used the occasion to grab the seat next to my mother and convince her to go out with him. (And people call me the family genius!)

  I was born more or less between campus protests, probably with something like Joni Mitchell playing in the background. Our family love nest was a room in my grandparents’ apartment. A laundry basket served as my first crib. Thankfully, that period isn’t easy to remember. Sometime around my three-month birthday, Papa signed up for his required eleven-month Army service rather than go to jail as the conscientious objector he probably was. He became such a good soldier and such an excellent marksman that he was rewarded with frequent weekend leave privileges. The family tale is that my sister Sara was conceived during one of those conjugal visits. When my mother wasn’t juggling two blondhaired rugrats, she worked as an editor on the foreign desk at the Finnish News Agency. Today she works as a graphics editor.

  It’s all part of the journalism mini-dynasty that I miraculously escaped. Sara has her own business translating reports for the news, and she also works at the Finnish News Agency. My half-brother, Leo Torvalds, is a video-type person who wants to direct films. Because my family members are basically all journalists, I feel qualified to joke with reporters about knowing what scum they are. I’m aware that I come off as a complete jerk when I say that, but over the years our home in Finland hosted its share of reporters who stopped at nothing to get their story, or who made up their stories from scratch, or who always seemed to have had just a little too much to drink. Okay: a lot too much to drink.

  That’s when it would be time to hide out in the bedroom. Or maybe Mom is having an emotional rough spot. We live in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an unremarkable pale yellow building on Stora Robertsgatan, in Rödbergen, a small area near the center of Helsinki. Sara and her obnoxious sixteen-month-older brother share a bedroom. There’s a small park nearby, named after the Sinebrychoff family, which owns a local brewery. That has always struck me as being odd, but is it any different from naming a basketball stadium after an office products vendor? (Because a cat had once been seen there, Sinebrychoffsparken was henceforth known in my family as the “Catpark.”) There’s a vacant little house there in which pigeons would gather. The park is built on a hill, and in the winter it’s a place to sled. Another play area is the cement courtyard behind our building, or on the building itself. Whenever we play hide-and-seek, it’s fun to climb the ladder five stories up to the roof.

  But no fun could compare to computer fun. With the computer at home, it was possible to stay up all night with it. Every boy stays up “reading” Playboy under the bedcovers. But instead of reading Playboy I would fake sleeping, wait for Mom to go away, jump up and sit in front of the computer. This was before the era of chatrooms.

  “Linus, it’s food time!” Some of the time you don’t even come out. Then your mother starts telling her journalist friends that you are such a low-maintenance child that all she has to do to keep you happy is store you in a dark closet with a computer and occasionally throw in some dry pasta. She’s not far off the mark. Nobody was worried about this kid getting kidnapped. (Hmmm. Would anybody have noticed?) Computers were actually better for kids when they were less sophisticated, when dweebie youngsters like me could tinker under the hood. These days, computers suffer from the same problem as cars: As they became more complex, they became more difficult for people to take apart and put back together, and, as a result, learn what they are all about. When was the last time you did anything on your car more involved than changing the oil filter?

  Instead of tinkering under the metaphoric hoods of their computers, kids these days are playing too many games, and losing their minds. Not that there’s anything wrong with games. They were some of my earliest programs.

  There was one in which you were controlling a small submarine in a grotto. It’s a very standard game concept. The world moves sideways, pans, and as a player you’re the submarine and you have to avoid hitting the walls and monster fish. The only thing that actually moves is the world. The fish move with the world. It all starts moving faster and faster the longer you play. Meanwhile, the grotto gets smaller and smaller. You cannot win this game, but that was never the point. It’s fun to play for a week or so and go on to the next game. The whole point is just writing the code to make it all happen.

  There are other toys, like model planes and ships and cars and railroads. At one point, Dad buys expensive German model trains. The reasoning is that he never had a model train set as a kid, and that it would be a good father-son hobby. It’s fun, but it doesn’t come close to the challenge of computers. The only time your computer privileges are taken away is not for spending too much time on the machine but as punishment for something else, like fighting with Sara. Throughout grammar school and high school the two of you are extremely competitive, particularly when it comes to academics.

  All the competition yields some good results. Without my constant taunting, Sara never would have been motivated to upstage me by writing six final essays, instead of the five required to graduate from high school in Finland. On the other hand, Sara is to be thanked for the fact that my English is not atrocious. She always made fun of my English, which for years was typical Finnish-English. That’s why it improved. For that matter, my mother teased me, too—but mostly about the fact that I was showing little interest in the female schoolmates who wanted to be tutored by the “Math Genius.”

  At times we lived with my dad and his girlfriend, at other times Sara lived with my dad and I lived with my mom. At times both of us lived with my mom. By the way, the Swedish language has no equivalent to the term “dysfunctional family.” As a result of the divorce, we didn’t have a lot of money. One of my most distinct memories is of the times when my Mom would have to pawn her only investment—the single share of stock in the Helsinki telephone company, that you owned as part of having a telephone. It was probably worth about $500, and every so often, when things got particularly tight, she would have to take the certificate to a pawn shop. I remember going with her once and feeling embarrassed about it. (Now I’m on the board of directors of the same company. In fact, the Helsinki Telephone Company is the only company where I’m a board member.) Embarrassed was also how I felt when, after I had saved most of the money for my first watch, Mom wanted me to ask my grandfather for the money to pay for the rest.

  There was a period when my mother was working nights, so Sara and I had to fend for ourselves in getting dinner. We were supposed to go to the corner store and buy food on our charge account. Instead, we would buy candy and it would be wonderful to stay up late on the computer. Under such circumstances, other boys would have been “reading” Playboy above the covers.

  Shortly after my grandfather had his stroke, Mormor didn’t feel like taking care of herself. She was bedridden in a nursing home for ten
years with what she called “wooziness.” When she had been in the hospital for a couple of years, we moved into her apartment. It was on the first floor of a solid old Russian-era building on Petersgatan, near the gracious park that lines Helsinki’s waterfront. There was a small kitchen and three bedrooms. Sara got the big bedroom. The gangly teenager, who was happy with a dark closet and periodic dry pasta, moved into the smallest one. I hung thick black drapes on the windows so no sunlight would seep in. The computer found a home on a tiny desk against the window, maybe two feet from my bed.

  I was vaguely aware of Linus Torvalds when an editor of the San Jose Mercury News Sunday magazine asked me to write a profile of him in the spring of 1999. Linux had become something of a buzzword the previous spring, when a succession of companies starting with Netscape had adopted either the notion of open source code or the operating system itself. Not that I had been up on the developments. In the early 1990s I had edited a magazine that dealt with Unix and Open Source issues, so there was a dusty reference sentence floating in my brain. In that reference, Linus was a Finnish college student who wrote a powerful version of Unix in his dorm room and distributed it freely over the Internet. It was not quite an accurate reference. The editor phoned because Linus had just been the star attraction—and mobbed—at a recent Linux show in San Jose, which prompted the editor to lure me into the assignment with the words, “We’ve got a global superstar right here in, uh, Santa Clara.” He faxed over some newspaper reports.

  Linus had moved to Silicon Valley two years earlier and was working for the then-secretive Transmeta Corporation, which had for years been developing a microprocessor that promised to upend the computer industry. He somehow had a job that allowed him to maintain his time-consuming position as the ultimate leader of Linux and final authority on any changes made to the operating system. (His followers had, in fact, initiated the legal maneuvering that gave him legal ownership of the Linux trademark.) And he had time to trot the globe as poster boy for the burgeoning open source movement.

  But he had become something of a mysterious folk hero. While Bill Gates, everybody’s favorite nemesis, was living in splendor in his Xanadu, Linus resided with his wife and toddler daughters in a cramped Santa Clara duplex. He apparently was unconcerned about the fabulous wealth that was being rained upon the flocks of less-talented programmers. And his very presence raised an unutterable conundrum among the stock-option-driven minions in Silicon Valley: How could anyone so brilliant possibly be so uninterested in getting rich?

  Linus has no handlers, doesn’t listen to voice mail, and rarely responds to email. It took weeks for me to get him on the phone, but once I did he easily agreed to an interview at his earliest convenience, which was about a month later: May 1999. Having developed a professional passion for putting interview subjects into compromising positions, I decided that a Finnish sauna might be the perfect backdrop for the profile. In a rented Mustang convertible, with a photographer at the wheel, we headed over to Santa Cruz and what was recommended as the Bay Area’s best sauna, which was on the grounds of a New Age/nudist retreat.

  He was armed with an opened can of Coke as he emerged from the innards of Transmeta’s offices in an anonymous Santa Clara office park. He wore the programmer’s uniform of jeans, conference T-shirt, and the inevitable socks-and-sandals combo that he claimed to have favored even before ever meeting another programmer. “It must be some programmer’s law of nature,” he reasoned when I asked about the footware choice.

  The first question to Linus, as we sat in the backseat, was a throwaway. “Are your folks in technology?” I asked while fiddling with my tape recorder.

  “No, they’re all basically journalists,” he replied, adding: “So I know what scum you are.”

  He didn’t think he could get away with that.

  “Oh. You come from scum?” I responded.

  The world’s best programmer laughed so hard that he coughed out a spray of Coke onto the back of the photographer-driver’s neck. He turned red. This would be the start of a memorable afternoon.

  It only got more bizarre. Finns are fanatical about their saunas and this was to be his first visit to one in nearly three years. The pale, naked superstar with steamed-up glasses sat on the highest perch, with his wet tan hair matted down on his face and a river of sweat flowing down what I would later, purely out of good will, describe as his “incipient paunch.” He was surrounded by tanned, self-obsessed Santa Cruzans and their monotonous New Age rantings, and he seemed above it all, eagerly pointing out the authentic features of the sauna. He had this beatific grin on his face.

  It’s my conviction that, for the most part, people in Silicon Valley are happier than everybody else. For one thing, they’re at the control panel of the economic revolution. More importantly, they’re all getting insufferably rich, both New Valley and Old Valley. But one never sees people smile there, at least not outside the confines of their brokers’ offices.

  Most acclaimed technologists—even most of the unacclaimed ones—have this immediate desire to let you know how brilliant they are. And that they are critical players in a mission that is far more important than, say, the struggle for world peace. That wasn’t the case with Linus. In fact, his lack of ego seemed downright disarming, and made him uniquely likable amid Silicon Valley’s bombastic elite. Linus appeared to be above it all. Above the New Agers. Above the high-tech billionaires.

  He seemed less like a reindeer caught in the global headlights than a delightful alien beamed down to show us the madness of our selfish ways.

  And I got the feeling that he didn’t get out much.

  Linus had earlier mentioned that an important part of the sauna ritual involved sitting around afterward, drinking beer and discussing world affairs. In preparation, we had stashed cans of Fosters in some bushes. We retrieved the beers and settled into the “quiet hot tub, where we opened the Fosters while the photographer took his pictures. I found Linus to be unexpectedly knowledgeable about American business history, and world politics. In his view, the United States would be better served if both corporations and political parties adopted the conciliatory approach of European politicians. He dipped his glasses into the hot tub in order to clean them, mentioning that he really didn’t need glasses but started wearing them as an adolescent under the logic that they made his nose look smaller. That’s when a clothed female manager appeared at the hot tub and humorlessly ordered us to hand over our beers, which were considered contraband in the otherwise free-spirited surroundings.

  Our only option was to shower, dress, and find a café for finishing the conversation. Most folks one meets in Silicon Valley have a cult-like zeal about them. They focus so intently on their business or killer application or The Industry that nothing else seems to exist. Nothing interrupts the continuous loop of selfcongratulation that passes for conversation. But there we were, sitting in the sun at a microbrewery, sampling the Godawful barleywine, with Linus chattering away like an uncaged canary—confessing his addiction to Classic Rock and Dean Koontz, revealing his weakness for the dumbest sitcoms, sharing off-the-record family secrets.

  And he didn’t have any great desire to circulate among the rich and powerful. I asked him what he would like to say to Bill Gates, but he wasn’t the least bit interested in even meeting the guy. “There wouldn’t be much of a connection point,” he reasoned. “I’m completely uninterested in the thing that he’s the best in the world at. And he’s not interested in the thing that maybe I’m the best in the world at. I couldn’t give him advice in business and he couldn’t give me advice in technology.”

  On the ride back over the mountain to Santa Clara, a black Jeep Cherokee pulled up alongside our car and its passenger yelled “Hey Linus!” and pulled out a throwaway camera to capture his apparent hero, who was sitting in the Mustang convertible’s backseat, grinning in the breeze.

  I showed up at his house a week later at bathtime. He fished his one-year-old blond daughter out of the tub and needed
someplace to deposit her while he fished out his two-year-old blond daughter. He handed the younger daughter to me and she promptly let out a yell. His wife Tove, who had been in another room the entire time, emerged to help. She is on the short side, pleasant, and bears a thistle tattoo on her ankle. Soon we were all reading Swedish and English bedtime books to the kids. Then we stood around in the garage, amid unpacked belongings, where the Torvalds discussed the impossibility of affording “a real house with a real back yard” in Silicon Valley. There was no bitterness about it.

  And, magnificently, they didn’t appear to see the irony.

  Soon we were watching Jay Leno, with cans of Guinness. That’s when I realized it made sense to do a book.

  V

  And I basically sat in front of a computer for four years.

  Okay, there was school: Norssen High, the most central of Helsinki’s five Swedish-language high schools, and the one nearest my home. Math and physics were interesting, and therefore easy. But whenever a subject involved rote memorization, my enthusiasm for that subject was diminished. So history was boring when it meant worrying about the date of the Battle of Hastings, but got interesting when you discussed the economic factors affecting a country. The same thing went for geography. I mean, who really cares how many people are in Bangladesh? Well, it might matter to a lot of folks, come to think of it. But the point is, it was far easier for me not to daydream about my computer when we were learning about something more engaging than statistics, like the monsoons, for example, or the reasons for the monsoons.

  Phys ed was another matter entirely. I’m probably not breaking any news by revealing that I wasn’t the most athletic guy on the Fennoscandia peninsula. I was skinny then, too, believe it or not. Gymnastics was actually okay to participate in. But when we would have soccer or ice hockey, it would be time for me to skip class.