Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Benedict Torvalds Read Free Book Online Page B

pair of snow boots?”
    “ About that size.”
    “ And what about your grandfather? Do you remember much about him?”
    “ He was probably my closest relative but I don’t… Okay. He was overweight, but not fat. He was balding. He was withdrawn, sort of like an absent-minded professor, which he was. I used to sit on his lap and type in his programs.”
    “ Can you remember what he smelled like?”
    “ No. What kind of a question is that?”
    “ Everybody’s grandfather smells like something. Cheap cologne. Bourbon. Cigars. What did he smell like?”
    “ I don’t know. I was too preoccupied with the computer to notice.”

I
    Some people remember time according to the cars they drove or the jobs they held or the places they lived or the sweethearts they dated. My years are marked by computers.
    I had only three computers while I was growing up. There was the aforementioned Commodore VIC-20, which I inherited from my grandfather. It was one of the first “home” computers, the predecessors to the present-day PCs. The Commodore 64 became sort of the big brother to the VIC-20, followed by the Amiga, which had a particularly strong following in Europe. Those computers never became truly popular, like the PC or even the Apple II, which was already common about the time I played around with the VIC.
    In those days before the proliferation of PCs, most of the programming on home computers was done in assembly language. (I can’t believe I’ve taken to starting sentences with “In those days…”) Computers had their own home-brew operating system, the equivalent of what DOS was on a PC. Depending on the computer, it was either a rudimentary format or a slightly more enhanced one. Like DOS, the OS had a program loader and a basic language environment. Back then there were no standards and a number of companies wanted to control the market. Commodore was one of the better known of these.
    When I had gotten about as much as I could out of the VIC-20, I started saving up for a next-generation model. This was a big deal in my life. As I mentioned, I’ve lost track of who in my family was living where at what particular time, and a lot of other things, but the path to my second computer was something that’s hard to forget.
    I had some Christmas-and-birthday money stashed away (because I was born on December 28th, the two occasions are sort of melded together). I also earned some money one summer working on the clean-up crew in Helsinki’s parks. Many of the parks in Helsinki aren’t landscaped and well-maintained, but are more like recreational or green areas that are overgrown forests. What we had to do was saw off overgrown bushes or pick up dead branches—it was even interesting. I’ve always liked the outdoors. I also had a newspaper route, too, at one point—except that it wasn’t newspapers, it was junk mail. Actually, I wasn’t really into summer jobs, come to think of it. But I did them in those days. On the whole, I probably got more money from school stipends.
    In Finland, it’s relatively common for people to give endowments to schools, even the public elementary schools. So, starting in fourth grade, money gets distributed to students based on whatever the person setting up the fund had in mind. I remember one of the endowments in my school went to the best-liked kid in class. This was in sixth grade and we actually voted within the class on who should get the money. It wasn’t me who won, I might add. The bounty amounted to only about 200 Finnmarks, which was maybe forty dollars, at the time, but it seemed like a lot of money to give a sixth grader just for being popular.
    Quite often the money went to the best person in a particular subject or sport. And a lot of the awards were school-specific or funded through the government. In some cases, the funds dwindled over time. I remember one that amounted to about a penny in value. When that was the situation, the school would chip in to make it