Linus Torvalds Named Recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award

Linus Torvalds Named Recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 23 April 2014 – Linus Torvalds, the principal force behind development of the Linux kernel and overseer of open source development for the Linux... More

Linus Torvalds Named Recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 23 April 2014 – Linus Torvalds, the principal force behind development of the Linux kernel and overseer of open source development for the Linux operating system, has been named the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award. Torvalds, a native of Helsinki, Finland, began working on the Linux kernel in 1991. An avid computer programmer, he authored many gaming applications in his early years. He did his early work on an Intel 386 CPU, using Minix, an Unixinspired operating system created by Andrew Tanenbaum for use as a teaching tool. After Torvalds formed a team of volunteers to work on the Linux kernel, V1.0 was released in the spring of 1994. Torvalds in 1996 joined Transmeta, a California-based startup that was designing an energy-saving central processing unit (CPU). He continued to oversee kernel development for Linux, and in 2003 left Transmeta Less