7 Bill Gates 7

It remains to be seen whether Gates’s extraordinary

success will guarantee him a lasting place in the pantheon

of great Americans. At the very least, historians seem likely

to view him as a business figure as important to computers

as John D. Rockefeller was to oil. Gates himself displayed

an acute awareness of the perils of prosperity in his 1995

best seller, The Road Ahead, where he observed, “Success is

a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they

can’t lose.”

Linus Torvalds

(b. Dec. 28, 1969, Helsinki, Fin.)

F

innish computer scientist Linus Torvalds was the

principal force behind the development of the Linux

operating system.

At age 10 Torvalds began to dabble in computer pro-

gramming on his grandfather’s Commodore VIC-20. In

1991, while a computer science student at the University

of Helsinki (M.S., 1996), he purchased his first personal

computer (PC). He was not satisfied, however, with the

computer’s operating system (OS). His PC used MS-DOS

(the disk operating system from Microsoft Corp.), but

Torvalds preferred the UNIX operating system he had

used on the university’s computers. He decided to create

his own PC-based version of UNIX. Months of deter-

mined programming work yielded the beginnings of an

operating system known as Linux. In 1991 he posted a

message on the Internet to alert other PC users to his new

system, made the software available for free download-

ing, and, as was a common practice among software

developers at the time, he released the source code, which

meant that anyone with knowledge of computer pro-

gramming could modify Linux to suit their own purposes.