LINUS TORVALDS

In 1991 Linus was a 22 year-old student in the computer science department at the University of Helsinki and wanted to run UNIX at home, but he couldn't afford it. So he wrote his own UNIX clone software from scratch and decided to give the code away. He called it Linux. Linux has all of the features you would expect of a modern, fully fledged Unix: true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared, copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and TCP/IP networking. Linux's beauty is that it can do anything UNIX can do--on a desktop PC. What's more, anyone can download it off the Internet for free.