Happy mother's day, Linus Torvalds

By David M Williams
Sunday, 10 May 2009 07:57

Opinion and Analysis

Today, May 10th 2009, is Mother's day for many countries around the world from Anguilla to Zimbabwe. How fitting, then, to offer a tribute to Linus Torvalds, the "mother" of Linux.

Mother’s day is a relatively modern celebration, created at the start of the 20th century in West Virginia by Anna Jarvis.

Some interesting tidbits for you: Jarvis’ own mother died in 1905. Two years later she held a memorial to her mother and campaigned to make “Mother’s Day” a recognised holiday. She succeeded in 1914 and a national day was established in the United States of America.

The name is specifically “Mother’s day” (singular, possessive) not “Mothers’ day” (plural) because the day is not meant to celebrate mothers as a group but rather for each individual family to pay respect to their mother.

Not too many years later Jarvis became soured on the commercialisation that had risen. She criticised people who sent their mother a printed greeting card, and who gave a box of candy while eating most of it themselves.

Jarvis and her sister both spent their fortune later campaigning against the day and they died in poverty. Jarvis never married and in bitter irony had no children of her own.

Many countries around the world adopted the event and the second Sunday of May date as used in the U.S. but the event is also celebrated throughout the year on different days in other countries, drawing on cultural heritages and related ancient festivities. These range from as early as February 2nd in Greece, and as late as December 22nd in Indonesia.

If your Linux-based computer could talk, today it would be expressing a warm Happy Mother’s Day greeting to its virtual mother, Finnish born Linus Benedict Torvalds.

Torvalds was born on December 28th, 1969 in Helsinki. His parents, Nils and Anna Torvalds, are journalists and his grandfather Ole Torvalds was a prominent journalist and poet, who received an honorary doctorate in 1978 for his work.

Despite such a literary heritage Linus was drawn towards the 8-bit computers that were popular during his youth. Like many young people in the 1980’s, he began with a Commodore VIC-20 and next purchased a Sinclair QL. Unlike most, however, he modified the QL extensively, especially its operating system!

In 1988 Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki studying Computer Science. On January 2nd, 1991, he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC. Initially he used this to play Prince of Persia but soon received a copy of MINIX which changed his life, and ours too.