Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (2 page)

D: War as a means of establishing social order.

L: Right. And also a means of establishing yourself as part of the social order. Nobody cares about social order, per se. Everybody cares about his own place in that order. It’s the same thing whether you’re a hen in a pecking order or you’re a human.

D: And now war is for entertainment?

L: That’s right.

D: Maybe for people watching it on TV. For them it might be entertaining.

L: Computer games. War games. CNN. Well, the
reason
for war can often be entertaining. But also the perception of war is entertaining. And the reason for sex is often entertaining. Sure, the survival part is still there, especially if you’re Catholic, right? But even if you’re Catholic, sometimes you probably think about the entertainment part, too. So it doesn’t have to be plain entertainment. In everything, a piece of the motivation might be survival, a piece might be social order, and the rest might be entertainment. Okay, look at technology. Technology came about as survival. And survival is not about just surviving, it’s about surviving better. You get a windmill that draws water from the well…

D: Or fire.

L: Right. It’s still survival, but it hasn’t progressed to social order and entertainment.

D: Now how has technology progressed to social order?

L: Well, actually most of industrialization has been really just survival, or surviving better. In cars, that meant making faster cars and nicer cars. But then you get to technology in a social sense. That brings us the telephone. And TV, to some degree. A lot of the early TV stuff was basically for indoctrination. Radio, too. That’s why countries often started investing in radio, for the social-order side of it.

D: Establishing and maintaining social order…

L: Right, but then it just goes past that. Today, TV is obviously used mostly for entertainment. And right now you see all these wireless mobile phones. It’s basically social. But it’s moving into entertainment, too.

D: So what’s the future of technology? We’ve gone beyond the survival stage and now we’re in the social stage, right?

L: Right. All technology used to do was make life easier. It was all about getting places faster, buying things cheaper, having better houses, whatever. So what’s so different about information technology? What comes after the fact that everybody is connected? What more is there to do? Sure, you can connect better, but that’s not fundamentally different. So where is technology taking us? In my opinion, the next big step is entertainment.

D: Everything eventually evolves into entertainment…

L: But this also explains why Linux is so successful, to some degree. Think of the three motivational factors. First is survival, which people with computers take for granted. Quite frankly, if you have a computer, you’ve already bought your food and stuff like that. The second is for social order, and the social side is certainly motivational for geeks sitting inside their own cubicles.

D: You said something really smart at Comdex, something about Linux development being a global team sport. So, you basically made that happen, dude.

L: Linux is a great example of why people love team sports, and especially being part of a team.

D: Yeah, sitting in front of a computer all day, you’d probably want to feel like you were part of something. Anything.

L: It’s social, like any other team sport. Imagine people on a football team, especially in high school. The social part of Linux is really, really important. But Linux is also entertainment, the kind of entertainment that is very hard to buy with money. Money is a very powerful motivational factor when you’re at the level of survival, because it’s easy to buy survival. It’s very easy to barter for those kinds of things. But suddenly when you’re at the level of entertainment, money…

D: Money is useless?

L: No, it’s not useless, because obviously you can buy movies, fast cars, vacations. There are a lot of things you can buy that can help make your situation better.

T: Linus, we need to change Daniela. And Patricia has to go potty. I need a cappuccino. Do you think we can find a Starbucks here? Where are we?

D: (looks up): Based on the odor, I think we’re near King City.

L: Now all this is on a bigger scale. It’s not just about people, it’s about life. It’s like the Law of Entropy. In this Entropy Law of Life, everything moves from survival to entertainment, but that doesn’t mean that on a local scale it can’t go backward, and obviously it essentially does. Things just disintegrate sometimes.

D: But as a system, everything is moving in the same direction…

L: Everything is moving in the same direction, but not at the same time. So basically sex has reached entertainment, war is close to it, technology is pretty much there. The new things are things that are just survival. Like, hopeful space travel will at some point be an issue of survival, then it will be social, then entertainment. Look at civilization as a cult. I mean, that also follows the same pattern. Civilization starts as survival. You get together to survive better and you build up your social structure. Then eventually civilization exists purely for entertainment. Okay, well, not purely. And it doesn’t have to be bad entertainment. The ancient Greeks are known for having had a very strong social order, and they also had a lot of entertainment. They’re known for having had the best philosophers of their time.

D: Okay, so how does this tie in to the meaning of life?

L: It doesn’t really. It just says that… that’s kind of the problem here.

D: This is the little link you’re going to have to think about.

P: Mama, look at the cows.

L: So, if you know that life is all about this progression, then obviously your purpose in life is to make this progression. And the progression is not one single progression. Everything you do is part of many progressions. It can also be, “What can I do to make society better?” You know that you’re a part of society. You know that society is moving in this direction. You can help society move in this direction.

T: (holding nose): It smells horrible here.

L: So what this builds up to is that in the end we’re all here to have fun. We might as well sit down and relax, and enjoy the ride.

Birth of a
NERD

I

I was an ugly child.

What can I say? I hope some day Hollywood makes a film about Linux, and they’ll be sure to cast somebody who looks like Tom Cruise in the lead role—but in the non-Hollywood version, things don’t work out that way.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Envision instead large front teeth, so that anybody seeing a picture of me in my younger years gets a slightly beaverish impression. Imagine also a complete lack of taste in clothes, coupled with the traditional oversized Torvalds nose, and the picture starts to complete in your mind.

The nose, I’m sometimes told, is “stately.” And people—well, at least in our family—say that the size of a man’s nose is indicative of other things, too. But tell that to a boy in his teens, and he won’t much care. To him, the nose only serves to overshadow the teeth. The picture of the profiles of three generations of Torvalds men is just a painful reminder that yes, there is more nose than man there. Or so it seems at the time.

Now, to add to the picture, start filling in the details. Brown hair (what here in the United States is called blond, but in Scandinavia is just “brown”), blue eyes, and a slight shortsightedness that makes wearing glasses a good idea. And, as wearing them possibly takes attention away from the nose, wear them I do. All the time.

Oh, and I already mentioned the atrocious taste in clothes. Blue is the color of choice, so that usually means blue jeans with a blue turtleneck. Or maybe turquoise. Whatever. Happily, our family wasn’t very much into photography. That way there’s less incriminating evidence.

There are a few photographs. In one of them I’m around thirteen years old, posing with my sister Sara, who is sixteen months younger. She looks fine. But I’m a gangly vision, a skinny pale kid contorting for the photographer, who was probably my mother. She most likely snapped the little gem on her way out the door to her job as an editor at the Finnish News Agency.

Being born at the very end of the year, on the 28th of December, meant that I was pretty much the youngest in my class at school. And that in turn meant the smallest. Later on, being half a year younger than most of your classmates doesn’t matter. But it certainly does during the first few years of school.

And do you know what? Surprisingly, none of it really matters all that much. Being a beaverish runt with glasses, bad hair days most of the time (and
really
bad hair days the rest of the time), and bad clothes doesn’t really matter. Because I had a charming personality.

Not.

No, let’s face it, I was a nerd. A geek. From fairly early on. I didn’t duct-tape my glasses together, but I might as well have, because I had all the other traits. Good at math, good at physics, and with no social graces whatsoever. And this was before being a nerd was considered a good thing.

Everybody has probably known someone in school like me. The boy who is known as being best at math—not because he studies hard, but just because he is. I was that person in my class.

But let me fill in the picture some more, before you start feeling too sorry for me. A nerd I may have been, and a runt, but I did okay. I wasn’t exactly athletic, but I wasn’t a hopeless klutz either. The game of choice during breaks at school was “brännboll”—a game of skill and speed in which two teams try to decimate each other by throwing a ball around. And while I wasn’t ever the top player, I was usually picked fairly early on.

So in the social rankings I might have been a nerd, but, on the whole, school was good. I got good grades without having to work at it—never truly great grades, exactly because I
didn’t
work at it. And an accepted place in the social order. Nobody else really seemed to care too much about my nose; this was almost certainly, in retrospect, because they cared about their own problems a whole lot more.

Looking back, I realize that most other children seem to have had pretty bad taste in clothes, too. We grow up and suddenly somebody else makes that particular decision. In my case, it’s the marketing staffs for high-tech companies, the people who select the T-shirts and jackets that will be given away free at conferences. These days, I dress pretty much exclusively in vendorware, so I never have to pick out clothes. And I have a wife to make the decisions that complete my wardrobe, to pick out things like sandals and socks. So I never have to worry about it again.

And I’ve grown into my nose. At least for now, I’m more man than nose.

II

It probably won’t surprise anyone that some of my earliest and happiest memories involve playing with my grandfather’s old electronic calculator.

This was my mother’s father, Leo Waldemar Törnqvist, who was a professor of statistics at Helsinki University. I remember having tons of fun calculating the sine of various random numbers. Not because I actually cared all that much for the answer (after all, not many people do), but because this was a long time ago, and calculators didn’t just give you the answer. They
calculated
it. And they blinked a lot while doing so, mainly in order to give you some feedback that “Yes, I’m still alive, and it takes me ten seconds to do this calculation, and in the meantime I’ll blink for you to show how much work I do.”

That was fascinating. Much more exciting than a modern calculator that won’t even break into a sweat when doing something as simple as calculating a plain sine of a number. With those early devices you knew that what they did was
hard.
They made it very clear indeed.

I don’t actually remember the first time I saw a computer, but I must have been around eleven at the time. It was probably in 1981, when my grandfather bought a new Commodore VIC-20. Since I had spent so much time playing with his magic calculator, I must have been thrilled—panting with excitement to start playing with the new computer—but I can’t really seem to remember that. In fact, I don’t even remember when I got really into computers at all. It started slowly, and it grew on me.

The VIC-20 was one of the first ready-made computers meant for the home. It required no assembly. You just plugged it into the TV and turned it on, and there it sat, with a big all-caps “READY” at the top of the screen and a big blinking cursor just waiting for you to do something.

The big problem was that there really wasn’t that much to do on the thing. Especially early on, when the infrastructure for commercial programs hadn’t yet started to materialize. The only thing you could really do was to program it in BASIC. Which was exactly what my grandfather started doing.

Now, my grandfather saw this new toy mainly
as
a toy, but also as a glorified calculator. Not only could it compute the sine of a number a lot faster than the old electronic calculator, but you could tell it to do this over and over automatically. He also could now do at home many of the things he had done with the big computers at the university.

And he wanted me to share in the experience. He also was trying to get me interested in math.

So I would sit on his lap and he would have me type in his programs, which he had carefully written out on paper because he wasn’t comfortable with computers. I don’t know how many other preteen boys sat in their grandfather’s room, being taught how to simplify arithmetic expressions and type them correctly into a computer, but I remember doing that. I don’t remember what the calculations were all about, and I don’t think I had a single clue about what I really did when I did it, but I was there, helping him. It probably took us much longer than it would have taken him alone, but who knows? I grew comfortable with the keyboard, something my grandfather never did. I would do this after school, or whenever my mother dropped me off at my grandparents’ apartment.