Seemingly overnight, the Linux operating system caught the world’s attention. My heart was in my throat when he was growing up: How on Earth was he going to meet any nice girls that way?ĭuring the euphoria of the final years of the twentieth century, a revolution was happening among all the other revolutions. We acknowledge our editor, Adrian Zackheim, who caved in to our every demand Erin Richnow, the HarperCollins assistant editor who was more on top of this project than we were our agents, Bill Gladstone of Waterside Productions and Kris Dahl of ICM, who couldn’t have been speedier in the forwarding of our checks to us Sara Torvalds, who has the best backup memory on the Fennoscandia peninsula-and operates in three languages-and William and Ruth Diamond, who read the original manuscript and kept repeating, “No, really, it’s good.” This wouldn’t qualify as acknowledgments without the dropping of some important names, so here goes: I always wanted to be surrounded by young women, and you made it so.

To Tove and Patricia, Daniela, and Celeste. Preface: The Meaning of Life I (Sex, War, Linux) The result is an engrossing portrayal of a man with a revolutionary vision, who challenges our values and may change our world. Now, in a narrative that zips along with the speed of e-mail, Torvalds gives a history of his renegade software while candidly revealing the quirky mind of a genius. And his creation LINUX is used by over 12 million people as well as by companies such as IBM.

Today Torvalds is an international folk hero. Then he wrote a groundbreaking operating system and distributed it via the Internet-for free. Once upon a time Linus Torvalds was a skinny unknown, just another nerdy Helsinki techie who had been fooling around with computers since childhood.

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