Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Read online

  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.

  D: Just for fun?

  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.

  And I started reading the manuals for the computer, typing in the example programs. There were examples of simple games that you could program yourself. If you did it right you wound up
with a guy that walked across the screen, in bad graphics, and then you could change it and make the guy walk across the screen in different colors. You could just do that.

  It’s the greatest feeling.

  I started writing my own. The first program I wrote was the first program everybody else starts out with:

  10 PRINT “HELLO”

  20 GOTO 10

  This does exactly what you expect it to do. It prints out HELLO on the screen. Forever. Or at least until you kill it out of boredom.

  But it’s the first step. Some people stop there. To them, it’s a stupid exercise because why would you want to print out HELLO a million times? But it was invariably the first example in the manuals that came with those early home computers.

  And the magic thing is that you can change it. My sister tells me that I made a radical second version of this program that didn’t just write out HELLO, but instead wrote SARA IS THE BEST on the screen, over and over again. Ordinarily I wasn’t such a loving older brother. Apparently the gesture made a big impression on her.

  I don’t remember doing it. As soon as I wrote a program I would forget about it and move on to the next one.

  III

  Let me tell you about Finland. Sometime in October the skies turn an unpleasant shade of gray, and it always looks as if it will either rain or snow. You wake up every day to this gloominess of anticipation. The rain will be chilly and it will rinse away any evidence of summer. When the snow comes, it has that magical quality of making everything bright and painting the place with a veneer of optimism. The trouble is, the optimism lasts about three days but the snow remains for month after bone-numbingly cold month.

  By January you sort of wander around in a shadowy daze, if you choose to go outside. It’s a season of moist, bulky clothes and slipping on the ice hockey rink they created by hosing down the grammar school field you traverse as a short-cut to the bus. On Helsinki streets it means dodging the occasional tottering matron who was probably somebody’s gracious grandmother back in September but by 11 A.M. on a Tuesday in January is weaving on the sidewalks from her vodka breakfast. Who can blame her? It will be dark again in a few hours, and there isn’t a lot to do. But there was an indoor sport that got me through the winter: programming.

  Morfar (the Swedish word for “Mother’s Father”) would be there much of the time, but not all the time. He doesn’t mind if you sit in his room when he’s away. You beg up the money for your first computer book. Everything is in English and it is necessary to decode the language. It’s difficult to understand technical literature in a language you don’t really know that well. You use your allowance to buy computer magazines. One of them contains a program for Morse code. The odd thing about this particular program is that it’s not written in the BASIC language. Instead, it’s written as a list of numbers that could be translated by hand to machine language—the zeros and ones that the computer reads.

  That’s how you discover that the computer doesn’t really speak BASIC. Instead it operates according to a much more simple language. Helsinki kids are playing hockey and skiing with their parents in the woods. You’re learning how a computer actually works. Unaware that programs exist to translate human-readable numbers into the zeros and ones that a computer understands, you just start writing programs in number form and do the conversions by hand. This is programming in machine language, and by doing it you start to do things you wouldn’t have thought possible before. You are able to push what the computer can do. You control every single small detail. You start to think about how you can do things slightly faster in a smaller space. Since there’s no abstraction layer between you and the computer, you get fairly close. This is what it’s like to be intimate with a machine.

  You’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen, whatever. Other kids are out playing soccer. Your grandfather’s computer is more interesting. His machine is its own world, where logic rules. There are maybe three people in class with computers and only one of them uses it for the same reasons. You hold weekly meetings. It’s the only social activity on the calendar, except for the occasional computer sleepover.

  And you don’t mind. This is fun.

  This is after the divorce. Dad lives in another part of Helsinki. He thinks his kid should have more than one interest, so he signs you up for basketball, his favorite sport. This is a disaster. You’re the runt of the team. After a season and a half, you use all sorts of nasty language to tell him you’re quitting, that basketball is his sport, not yours. Your new half-brother, Leo, will be more athletic. Then, too, he will eventually become Lutheran, like 90 percent of the Finnish population. That’s when Dad, the staunch agnostic, realized he might be a failure as a parent—something he suspected years earlier, when Sara joined the Catholic church.

  The grandfather with the computer isn’t really a jolly sort. He’s balding, slightly overweight. He literally is something of an absent-minded professor and kind of hard to approach. He’s just not an extrovert. Picture a mathematician who would stare out into space and not say anything while he was thinking about something. You could never tell what he was thinking about. Complexity analysis? Mrs. Sammalkorpi down the hall? I’m the same way—famous for zoning out. When I’m sitting in front of the computer, I get really upset and irritable if somebody disturbs me. Tove could elaborate on this point.

  My most vivid memories of Morfar take place not at his computer but at his little red cottage. In Helsinki it used to be common for people to keep a small summer place consisting of maybe a single thirty-foot by thirty-foot room. The little houses are on a tiny plot of land, maybe 150 square feet, and people go there to tinker in their gardens. They typically have an apartment in the city and then this little place to grow potatoes or tend a few apple trees or cultivate roses. It’s usually older people because younger ones are busy working. These people get ridiculously competitive about whatever it is they are growing. That’s where Morfar planted my apple tree, a small sapling. Maybe it’s still there, unless it became so abundant that an envious neighbor snuck onto his property during the brief summer darkness and chopped it down.

  Four years after introducing me to computers, Morfar develops a blood clot in his brain and becomes paralyzed on one side. It’s a shock to everyone. He’s in the hospital for about a year and he’s the closest family you have, but it doesn’t affect you that much. Maybe it’s defensive or maybe it’s just because you’re so insensitive when you’re young. He is absolutely not the same person anymore and you don’t like going to see him. You go maybe every two weeks. Your mother goes more often. So does your sister, who early on assumed the role of the family social worker.

  After he dies, the machine comes to live with you. There isn’t any real discussion about it.

  IV

  Let’s step back for a moment.

  Finland might be the hippest country on Earth right now, but centuries ago, it was little more than a stopover for Vikings as they “traded” with Constantinople. Later, when the neighboring Swedes wanted to pacify the Finns, they sent in English-born Bishop Henry, who arrived in the year 1155 on a mission for the Catholic church. Those proselytizing Swedes manned the Finnish fortresses to ward off the Russians, and eventually won against the empire to our East in the struggle for control. To spur population of the Finnish colony in the following centuries, Swedes were offered land and tax incentives. Swedes ran the show until 1714, when Russia took over for a seven-year interlude. Then Sweden won back its colony until 1809, when Russia and Napoleon attacked Finland; it remained under Russian control until the Communist Revolution in 1917. Meanwhile, the descendants of the early Swedish immigrants are the 350,000 Swedish speakers in Finland today, a group that represents about five percent of the population.

  Including my wacky family.

  My maternal great-grandfather was a relatively poor farmer from Jappo, a small town near the city of Vasa. He had six sons, at least two of whom earned Ph.D.’s. That says a lot about the prospects for advancement in Finlan
d. Yes, you get sick of the winter darkness and taking off your shoes upon entering a house. But you can get a university education for free. It’s a far cry from what happens in the United States, where so many kids grow up with a sense of hopelessness. One of those six sons was my grandfather, Leo Waldemar Törnqvist, the fellow who introduced me to computing.

  Then there was my paternal grandfather. He was the fellow who concocted the name Torvalds, fashioning it out of his middle name. He was named Ole Torvald Elis Saxberg. My grandfather had been born fatherless (Saxberg was his mother’s maiden name) and was given the last name Karanko by the gentleman my great-grandmother eventually married. Farfar (“Father’s father”) didn’t like the guy, enough so he changed his name. He dropped the last name and added an “s” to Torvald on the theory that this made it sound more substantial. Torvald on its own means “Thor’s domain.” He should have started from scratch, because what the adding of an “s” does is destroy the meaning of the root name, and confuse both Swedish-and Finnish-speaking people, who don’t know how the heck to pronounce it. And they think it should be spelled Thorwalds. There are twenty-one Torvalds in the world, and we’re all related. We all endure the confusion.

  Maybe that’s why I’m always just “Linus” on the Net. “Torvalds” is just too confusing.

  This grandfather didn’t teach at a university. He was a journalist and poet. His first job was as editor-in-chief of a small-town newspaper about 100 kilometers west of Helsinki. He got sacked for drinking on the job with a little too much regularity. His marriage to my grandmother broke down. He moved to the city of Turku in Southwestern Finland, where he remarried and finally became editor-in-chief of the newspaper and published several books of poetry, although he always struggled with a drinking problem. We would visit him there for Christmas and Easter, and to see my grandmother, too. Farmor Märta lives in Helsinki, where she is known for making killer pancakes.