Linus Torvalds was born in 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. He attended the University of Helsinki and graduated in 1996 with a degree in computer science. In the early 90s he discovered the Minix demo, a Unix based operating system, and was inspired to create his own. While attending the university, he wrote it on his own time using his own resources and later released it to a newsgroup in September of 1991 after a friend made it available on an FTP server. The result was an open source operating system project that has spawned several different flavors of the system and code. Today, Linux is gaining ground in the desktop market, and is also a front runner in high end enterprise systems. Torvalds’ contribution of the kernel is credited with single handedly completing the GNU project’s goal of a free, Unix based operating system.
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