Glyn Moody at Linux Journal reports:Today is the birthday of Linus. Although that's essentially a private event for him, there's an interesting historical link to the creation of the Linux kernel, too.... To this student loan, Linus added what he termed “Christmas money”. As anyone who has a birthday very near Christmas will tell you, such “Christmas money” almost invariably includes money for the birthday bundled in too, so it's likely that some funds for the PC arrived in the form of birthday presents. Significantly, Linus wasted no time in buying the new computer after Christmas – and hence his birthday. As he told me in 1996: “ I remember the first non-holiday day of the New Year I went to buy a PC.” The specification is rather sobering:
386, DX33, 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, 40 Megs hard disc
Today, >90% of supercomputers run the kernel that Linus wrote on that humble machine. You never know what your "Christmas money" will do for a youngster, I guess.
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