Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (10 page)

We arrive at her mother’s first-floor apartment and Anna Torvalds is thrilled to see us. Mikke is her nickname. She refuses to let me indulge in be Finnish custom of removing one’s shoes: “Don’t be silly. This place is already dusty. You couldn’t possibly make it worse.” She is short, dark-haired, and extremely quick-witted. Within seconds of our arrival, the telephone rings. A real estate agent wants to show me the vacant apartment adjacent to Mikke’s, so that I could describe it to her son in the United-States and hand-deliver literature about it, in the event that he might want to purchase the place as a sort of Helsinki
pied-a-terre.
We enter the brawling apartment, where the agent, who bears an eerie resemblance to be Annette Bening character in the film
American Beauty,
instructs us to slip little blue cloth booties over our shoes before we take the tour. Soon the agent, in an annoyingly cheerful tone, says something like, “Now this room here. It’s a perfect room for antiques that you wouldn’t want to have damaged by the sun.” Mikke shoots me a conspiratorial glance and replies, in a mocking voice: “Oh, what a delightful way of telling us this room doesn’t get any light.”

Back in her own kitchen, Mikke sits at a rectangular table earing a colorful tablecloth and pours coffee into an oversized mug. Her apartment, like that of her ex-husband, brims with books and folk art. There are black and white Marimekko curtains. The apartment originally contained three bedrooms and a kitchen. When her children moved out, Mikke moved into the large bedroom that had
been occupied b
y
Sara. She then dismantled the walls around Linus’s room, and those round her original bedroom, to create a huge livingroom/kitchen. She points to a vacant spot and says, “That’s where his computer was. I guess should put up some sort of plaque. What do you think?” She chain smokes. She is an easy conversationalist, with such a solid command of English that there are no pauses when she delivers a phrase like, “He’s not some random shmuck you meet on the street.” On the wall in her bedroom is a huge Soviet flag. It was a gift to Linus from Jouko Vierumaki, who had bought it during an international ski-jump competition. Linus had kept it in a drawer for years, but Mikke hung it above her bed.

Mikke laughs as she relives the years in which Linus hid in his room, slaving away on a computer. “Nicke kept saying to me, ‘Kick him out, make him get a job,
’
but Linus wasn’t bothering me. He didn’t require much. And whatever it was he was doing with his computer, that was his business, his thing, and he had a right to do it. I had no idea what it was all about.”

Months earlier, when I emailed Mikke requesting her recollections of Linus’s childhood, her response was lengthy and well-crafted. She titled her essay, “On Raising Linus from a Very Small Nerd.” In it, she recounted her early observations that her toddler son showed the same signs of scientific determination she saw in her father and older brother: “When you see a person whose eyes glaze over when a problem presents itself or continues to bug him or her, who then does not hear you talking, who fails to answer any simple question, who becomes totally engrossed in the activity at hand, who is ready to forego food and sleep in the process of working out a solution, and who
does not give up.
Ever. He—or she, of course—may be interrupted, and in the course of daily life often is, but blithely carries on later, single-mindedly. Then you know.” She wrote about the sibling rivalry between Linus and Sara, and about the irreconcilable differences. (Sara: “I don’t LIKE the taste of mushrooms/liver/whatever.” Linus: “YES YOU DO!”) And the grudging respect. “Linus once expressed his awe of his sister very succinctly at an early age. He might have been five or seven or whatever, when he very seriously told me: ‘You see. I don’t think any new thoughts. I think thoughts that other people have thought, and I rearrange them. But Sara, she thinks thoughts that never were before.
’”

These reminiscences may reveal that I still don’t think Linus has any ‘special’ talent and certainly not for computers—if it weren’t that, it would be something else. In another day and age he would focus on some different challenge, and I think he will. (What I mean is, I hope he won’t be stuck in Linux maintenance forever). For he is, I think, motivated not by ‘computers,
’
and certainly not by fame or riches, but by honest curiosity and a wish to conquer difficulties as they arise, and to do it *the right way
*
because that’s the way it IS and he won’t give up.

I only hope the Ghouls of Fame won’t distract him too much. (Fame seems not to have changed him, but he
has
mellowed, and now tends to talk to people when they approach him. He even seems to have difficulty saying no. But I suspect it has more to do with his having become a husband and father than with all the media hullabaloo).

About my first memory of Linus doing something remarkable.

I think it was early 1992. I was visiting Linus at his completely messy home once again-by bike and with no agenda. While watching MTV, as usual, I asked about Linus’s operating-system development. Normally he answered something meaningless. This time, he led me to his computer (from Torvalds’ messy kitchen to his totally chaotic room).

Linus gave the computer his username and password and got to a command prompt. He showed some basic functionality of the command interpreter-nothing special, though. After a while, he turned to me with a Linus grin on his face and asked: “It looks like DOS, doesn’t it?”

I was impressed and nodded. I wasn’t stunned, because it looked like DOS too much-with nothing new, really. I should have known Linus never grins that way without a good reason. Linus turned back to his computer and pressed some function key combination-another login screen appeared. A new login and a new command prompt. Linus showed me four. individual command prompts and explained that later they could be accessed by four separate users.

That was the moment I knew Linus had created something wonderful. I have no problem with that-I still dominate the snooker table.

– Jouko “Avuton” Vierumaki

For me, it meant mainly that the phone lines were constantly busy and nobody could call us… At some point, postcards began arriving from different corners of the globe. I suppose that’s when I realized people in the real world were actually using what he had created.

– Sara Torvalds

V: The Beauty of Programming

I don’t know how to really explain my fascination with programming, but I’ll try. To somebody who does it, it’s the most interesting thing in the world. It’s a game much more involved than chess, a game where you can make up your own rules and where the end result is whatever you can make of it.

And yet, to the outside, it looks like the most boring thing on Earth.

Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain: just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it. Unerringly. Forever. Without a complaint.

And that’s interesting in itself.

But blind obedience on its own, while initially fascinating, obviously does not make for a very likable companion. In fact, that part gets pretty boring fairly quickly. What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out
how.

I’m personally convinced that computer science has a lot in common with physics. Both are about how the world works at a rather fundamental level. The difference, of course, is that while in physics you’re supposed to figure out how the world is made up, in computer science you
create
the world. Within the confines of the computer, you’re the creator. You get to ultimately control everything that happens. If you’re good enough, you can be God. On a small scale.

And I’ve probably offended roughly half the population on Earth by saying so.

But it’s true. You get to create your own world, and the only thing that limits what you can do are the capabilities of the machine—and, more and more often these days, your own abilities.

Think of a treehouse. You can build a treehouse that is functional and has a trapdoor and is stable. But everybody knows the difference between a treehouse that is simply solidly built and one that is beautiful, that takes creative advantage of the tree. It’s a matter of combining art and engineering. This is one of the reasons programming can be so captivating and rewarding. The functionality often is second to being interesting, being pretty, or being shocking.

It is an exercise in creativity.

The thing that drew me into programming in the first place was the process of just figuring out how the computer worked. One of the biggest joys was learning that computers are like mathematics: You get to make up your own world with its own rules. In physics, you’re constrained by existing rules. But in math, as in programming, anything goes as long as it’s self-consistent. Mathematics doesn’t have to be constrained by any external logic, but it must be logical in and of itself. As any mathematician knows, you literally can have a set of mathematical equations in which three plus three equals two. You can do anything you want to do, in fact, but as you add complexity, you have to be careful not to create something that is inconsistent within the world you’ve created. For that world to be beautiful, it can’t contain any flaws. That’s how programming works.