Oral History of linus Torvalds
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- Booch
Oral History of Linus Torvalds
CHM Ref: X4147.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 4 of 41
Torvalds: No, no, I have to admit, I am not very-- I mean I don't get sentimental about my computers. The moment I've, see something newer and shinier, the old ones go out the window so fast. So I don't have my first, well my grandfather's first, computer. I don't have the computer I even started writing Linux on. They've all been given away. Booch: But your first computer you bought in 1987, I understand. Do you remember that one? It was a Sinclair, apparently. Torvalds: It would have probably been early in '87. It was a Sinclair QL, another completely unheard of machine, unless you happen to be British or you happen to just follow Sir Clive Sinclair's escapades into odd technology. An d it actually ended up… it was a nice computer from a hardware standpoint even though the fact that it was odd again meant that I ended up writing all my own programs, because there were no programs that you could basically buy for it. So it was maybe a bad choice from a practical standpoint, but it actually was a good choice in the sense that-- yet another reason why I continued with the programming. Booch: So you self-taught yourself programming, it sounds like. Torvalds: Yes, I mean there were programming classes in high school at the time, but they were pretty basic and rudimentary. Booch: So you were certainly doing things out of the norm of what your peers were doing. Were there other computer types that you associated with or were you sort of the guy out there? Torvalds: Not really. I mean, there was usually somebody. There were other people with computers, most of them just played games. So there were a couple of people that I was together with and did actual programming, but mostly it was very solitary, probably that's just-- I mean me personally. There were computer clubs for the VIC-20, for example, where you could get together and do things like that. And I think I attended one meeting just because. I thought it was interesting but I wasn't social enough to actually keep up with that, so…
interested in making the hardware do. So, one of the games I remember best was actually one of my early games on the VIC-20, where I actually wrote this routine to just scroll the screen sideways, which was not that simple to do efficiently in graphics mode on a CPU that wasn't very powerful. But I had no real use for it, but I did it just because I was interested in the hardware and trying to make things go as fast as possible. And then I turned that into a sideways scrolling game, which was more of a, whatever-- it was a small submarine that had to avoid fish coming at you. It was not a good game, but that wasn't the point. So I basically never played the game, and my interest was always the computer itself and the program.
: At that point, I was doing almost exclusively assembly programming just because…
Oral History of Linus Torvalds
CHM Ref: X4147.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 5 of 41
Booch: What was the microprocessor for that machine? Torvalds: That was a 6502, so. And I was literally-- actually I wasn't even doing assembly programming, I was doing machine code because I would not, I did not have an assembler. I would do all my assembly on paper and write it as binary, just because. Again, I don't know, I didn’t any money so I couldn't buy an assembler anyway, but be-- I didn’t know any be tter. So it was like, I had to learn to do machine code programming by-- there were all these programs which had tables in them with just the tables of assembly language, which I thought that was how you did machine code. So that's how I ended up doing everything.
was the most common opcode, so that one I still remember, but that's pretty much the only one I think. Booch: This is from around age 10, 11 or so, and then you eventually went to college. But let's fill in the era in between there. What was life like growing up in Helsinki, because you were actually in a Swedish speaking minority in the area? Did that have any impact upon you?
with about 95 percent of the population speaking it. But for historical reasons, because Finland used to be part of Sweden a long time ago, Swedish is still an official language and it's spoken by about five percent of the population, and I happen to be part of that five percent. So I grew up speaking-- and you can do it to different degrees. My wife, for example, is also part of the five percent that speaks Swedish, but she lived in an area where there were no Swedish speaking schools, most of the time, so she went to a Finnish school. So her Finnish is much stronger than mine is. I only used Finnish when I was going out to stores or later on at university, my friends all spoke Swedish. I went through Swedish school up until-- in fact even through university, some of the classes were in Swedish.
kind of literature I was interested in, science fiction, was much cheaper to buy in English and the selection was much better, too. So again, the fact that I had no money came up here as a reason for learning to read English. But actually, not until I moved to the U.S. did I ever speak English with anybody, so. And I remember moving here in '97, and for the first two weeks, I had a horrible headache because I had a really hard time understanding people. I had to really concentrate on the spoken language and that was fairly stressful. But one of the reasons my English is fairly natural is that Swedish is not that different a language, so, you can still-- people still recognize that, okay, where are you from, from my pronunciation. But it's my second language now. My Finnish is…
fiction in that age. What are some of your authors that you remember back then or stories that stick in your head? Yüklə 332,77 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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