Oral History of Linus Torvalds
CHM Ref: X4147.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 26 of 41
vendor. If you didn’t have Oracle, you weren’t a real Unix vendor. So that was kind of
a big event that I
remember reacting to, but at the same time, most of this happened so gradually. And a lot of it was like
even when it was a big thing you could kind of see things leading up to it, so the only point I was really
surprised at, it was lite
rally like late ‘91 and early ‘92 when it went from my personal projects to hey,
there’s actually 10 people using it or 100 people using! That was a much bigger step. Then everything
else was not that big of a deal, because it wasn’t what I was interested
in anyway.
Booch:
For Transmeta, that’s when you relocated to the U.S., to the Bay Area?
Torvalds: Yes.
Booch: Was that a bit of a shock to come to the Bay area?
Torvalds:
It was and it wasn’t. It was
-
we did it I don’t know, it probably wasn’t the smar
t way. But my first
daughter was born ten weeks before we moved, so I was a new dad, moving to a new country to my first
real job. I mean I had had a job at the University but let’s face it, being a
-- that was still a fairly gradual
thing and this was like my first job out of school; new language, new culture, having to buy a car, realizing
later on that you have to buy two cars. So it was a big thing but I really think that on the whole because of
Patricia’s birth, that was a fairly chaotic time anyway, so
in retrospect it probably worked out pretty well
and apart from remembering having headaches for the first few weeks, it is all a blur. But it was very
good. It was a really nice decision to make, and what we reacted to later was we met some people who
had also moved from Finland to the Bay Area and they were working for Nokia who had opened an office
there in later on. I reacted; my wife too, reacted very strongly to how they moved completely
differently. They knew that they were moving for two years or three years, and then they would move
back. We had this whole thing, “We’ll move to the U.S. and see how it is.” And I think we integrated a lot
better because of that, because we didn’t have this knowledge of we’ll move back. It was more like o
kay,
if things don’t work out we’ll move back, but we didn’t have a plan, so it was
-- and Finland is not that
culturally different. Apart from the whole car thing and the language thing it was not a big shock.
Booch: When did Linux get the penguin mascot? When did that sort of hit the scene?
Torvalds:
We did it for one of the releases. I forget which one. I don’t think it was 1.0. It might have been
1.2 or 2.0. When people-- it was getting fairly popular commercially and people really felt that we needed
a logo.
Booch: Did you think it was a crazy idea to need a logo?
Torvalds: No, I thought it was a good idea. I thought it made sense to have a logo and unify things
around something. But some of the ideas were pretty crazy.
Booch: Like?
Torvalds: A number of people, for example, felt that okay, since we have
this wild and crazy name of
Open Source and being university students and things like that, the logo should be really corporate and
staid to kind of balance it out, so some of the logo suggestions were really pretty boring. And I had kind of
the opposite reaction where I wanted to have something cuddly, something friendly, something non-scary.
Oral History of Linus Torvalds
CHM Ref: X4147.2008 © 2008 Computer History Museum Page 27 of 41
When I actually visited Japan later on I noticed they had started using a logo with a very cuddly octopus,
which was a wonderful logo because it fit my kind of requirements really well, and apparently for some
reason octopi are considered to be friendly in Japan. Whatever.
Booch: I just eat them.
Torvalds:
Maybe because they’re good eating, I don’t know. So the
y ended up using a different logo than
the penguin, but I wanted something, an animal. If you want something cuddly, it needs to be like an
animal, but you can’t have a dog as a logo because I mean that’s not very interesting, right?
Booch: I remember reading an email though of how you characterized what the penguin should look like.
Torvalds: I was basically at
some point I decided okay, it should be a penguin and that was probably
influenced by there’s this movie studio. Well, it was not a movie studio a
t that point, Aardman Studios.
Booch: Oh they do the claymation stuff.
Torvalds: They do claymation stuff. And they had-
Booch: Wallace and Gromit.
Torvalds: They did Wallace and Gromit
and now in the U.S. they’re better known for is
Wallace and Gromit.
Booch: Yes that was a good one.
Torvalds: But before that there was the movie about chickens,
Chicken Run.
Booch: Oh
Chicken Run. I can tell you have daughters.
Torvalds: But even before that they used to do these commercials for British
TV using clay animation,
and one of them had this fat penguin, and I saw that. Somebody sent me a picture of that and I saw that
and said “Okay, that’s more like it. That’s what we want to have.” I didn’t want to use somebody else’s
penguin, obviously, and I ca
n’t draw. My artistic talents are a perfect zero. So I basically said “What we
want is this cartoonish penguin, sitting down, fat, gorged on herring, and just very happy and cuddly.” And
that’s how somebody who could draw actually made the logo. I had like
hundreds of people send me
logos, most of them pretty horrible. But I’m really happy with it. Not everybody was. People really felt that
it was not very professional. Let’s face it. It’s more like it’s not really even a penguin because it actually
has an
orange beak and orange flippers and penguins don’t have that. It’s more like a duck that was
raped by a penguin or something, right? It’s this cross
-species thing.
Booch: You gave it the name Tux?