Just for Fun

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 28^th 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 "brannboll't -- 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 Tornqvist, 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 Finland. 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 Tornqvist, 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 Marta lives in Helsinki, where she is known for making killer pancakes.

Farfar died five years ago.

Okay: I've never read any of his books. It's a fact that my father points out to total strangers.

Journalists are everywhere in my family. Legend has it that one of my great-grandfathers, Ernst von Wendt, was a journalist and novelist who was on the White side and arrested by the Reds during the Finnish Civil War that followed our independence from Russia in 1917. (Okay. I never read his books, either, and am told I'm not missing much.) My father, Nils (known to everyone as Nicke), is a television and radio journalist who was active in the Communist Party since he was a college student in the 1960s. He developed his political leanings when he learned about some of the atrocities committed against communist sympathizers in Finland. Decades later he admits that his enthusiasm for communism may have been born out of naivete. He met my mother Anna (known as Mikke) when they were both rebellious university students in the 1960s. His story is that they were on an outing for a club of Swedish-speaking students, of which he was president. He had a rival for my mother's attention, and as they were preparing for the return bus trip to Helsinki, he instructed the rival to oversee the loading of the bus. He used the occasionto grab the seat next to my mother and convince her to go out with him. (And people call me the family genius!)

I was born more or less between campus protests, probably with something like Joni Mitchell playing in the background. Our family love nest was a room in my grandparents' apartment. A laundry basket served as my first crib. Thankfully, that period isn't easy to remember. Sometime around my three-month birthday, Papa signed up for his required eleven-month Army service rather than go to jail as the conscientious objector he probably was. He became such a good soldier and such an excellent marksman that he was rewarded with frequent weekend leave privileges. The family tale is that my sister Sara was conceived during one of those conjugal visits. When my mother wasn't juggling two blond-haired rugrats, she worked as an editor on the foreign desk at the Finnish News Agency. Today she works as a graphics editor.

It's all part of the journalism mini-dynasty that I miraculously escaped. Sara has her own business translating reports for the news, and she also works at the Finnish News Agency. My half-brother, Leo Torvalds, is a video-type person who wants to direct films. Because my family members are basically all journalists, I feel qualified to joke with reporters about knowing what scum they are. I'm aware that I come off as a complete jerk when I say that, but over the years our home in Finland hosted its share of reporters who stopped at nothing to get their story, or who made up their stories from scratch, or who always seemed to have had just a little too much to drink. Okay: a lot too much to drink.

That's when it would be time to hide out in the bedroom. Or maybe Mom is having an emotional rough spot. We live in a two-bedroom apartment on the second Boor of an unremarkable pale yellow building on Stora Robertsgatan, in Rodbergen, a small area near the center of Helsinki. Sara and her obnoxious sixteen-month-older brother share a bedroom. There's a small park nearby, named after the Sinebrychoff family, which owns a local brewery. That has always struck me as being odd, but is it any different from naming a basketball stadium after an office products vendor? (Because a cat had once been seen there, Sinebrychoffsparken was henceforth known in my family as the "Carpark.") There's a vacant little house there in which pigeons would gather. The park is built on a hill, and in the winter it's a place to sled. Another play area is the cement courtyard behind our building, or on the building itself. Whenever we play hide-and-seek, it's fun to climb the ladder five stories up to the roof.

But no fun could compare to computer fun. With the computer at home, it was possible to stay up all night with it. Every boy stays up "reading" Playboy under the bedcovers. But instead of reading Playboy I would fake sleeping, wait for Mom to go away, jump up and sit in front of the computer. This was before the era of chatrooms.

"Linus, it's food time!" Some of the time you don't even come out. Then your mother starts telling her journalist friends that you are such a low-maintenance child that all she has to do to keep you happy is store you in a dark closet with a computer and occasionally throw in some dry pasta. She's not far off the mark. Nobody was worried about this kid getting kidnapped. (Hmmm. Would anybody have noticed?) Computers were actually better for kids when they were less sophisticated) when dweebie youngsters like me could tinker under the hood. These days, computers suffer from the same problem as cars: As they became more complex, they became more difficult for people to take apart and put back together, and, as a result, learn what they are all about. When was the last time you did anything on your car more involved than changing the oil filter?

Instead of tinkering under the metaphoric hoods of their computers, kids these days are playing too many games, and losing their minds. Not that there's anything wrong with games. They were some of my earliest programs.

There was one in which you were controlling a small submarine in a grotto. It's a very standard game concept. The world moves sideways, pans, and as a player you're the submarine and you have to avoid hitting the walls and monster fish. The only thing that actually moves is the world. The fish move with the world. It all starts moving faster and faster the longer you play. Meanwhile, the grotto gets smaller and smaller. You cannot win this game, but that was never the point. It's fun to play for a week or so and go on to the next game. The whole point is just writing the code to make it all happen.

There are other toys, like model planes and ships and cars and railroads. At one point, Dad buys expensive German model trains. The reasoning is that he never had a model train set as a kid, and that it would be a good father-son hobby. It's fun, but it doesn't come close to the challenge of computers. The only time your computer privileges are taken away is not for spending too much time on the machine but as punishment for something else, like fighting with Sara. Throughout grammar school and high school the two of you are extremely competitive, particularly when it comes to academics.

All the competition yields some good results. Without my constant taunting, Sara never would have been motivated to upstage me by writing six final essays, instead of the five required to graduate from high school in Finland. On the other hand, Sara is to be thanked for the fact that my English is not atrocious. She always made fun of my English, which for years was typical Finnish-English. That's why it improved. For that matter, my mother teased me, too -- but mostly about the fact that I was showing little interest in the female schoolmates who wanted to be tutored by the "Math Genius."

At times we lived with my dad and his girlfriend, at other times Sara lived with my dad and I lived with my mom. At times both of us lived with my mom. By the way, the Swedish language has no equivalent to the term "dysfunctional family," Asa result of the divorce, we didn't have a lot of money. One of my most distinct memories is of the times when my Mom would have to pawn her only investment -- the single share of stock in the Helsinki telephone company, that you owned as part of having a telephone. It was probably worth about $500, and every so often, when things got particularly tight, she would have to take the certificate to a pawn shop. I remember going with her once and feeling embarrassed about it. (Now I'm on the board of directors of the same company. In fact, the Helsinki Telephone Company is the only company where I'm a board member.) Embarrassed was also how I felt when, after I had saved most of the money for my first watch, Mom wanted me to ask my grandfather for the money to pay for the rest.

There was a period when my mother was working nights, so Sara and I had to fend for ourselves in getting dinner. We were supposed to go to the corner store and buy food on our charge account. Instead, we would buy candy and it would be wonderful to stay up late on the computer. Under such circumstances, other boys would have been "reading" Playboy above the covers.

Shortly after my grandfather had his stroke, Mormor didn't feel like taking care of herself. She was bedridden in a nursing home for ten years with what she called "wooziness." When she had been in the hospital for a couple of years, we moved into her apartment. It was on the first floor of a solid old Russian-era "building on Petersgatan, near the gracious park that lines Helsinki's waterfront. There was a small kitchen and three bedrooms. Sara got the big bedroom. The gangly teenager, who was happy with a dark closet and periodic dry pasta, moved into the smallest one. I hung thick black drapes on the windows so no sunlight would seep in. The computer found a home on a tiny desk against the window, maybe two feet from my bed.

I was vaguely aware of Linus Torvalds when an editor of the San Jose Mercury News Sunday magazine asked me to write a profile of him in the spring of 1999. Linux had become something of a buzzword the previous spring, when a succession of companies starting with Netscape had adopted either the notion of open source code or the operating system itself. Not that I had been upon the developments. In the early 1990s I had edited a magazine that dealt with Unix and Open Source issues, so there was a dusty reference sentence floating in my brain. In that reference, Linus was a Finnish college student who wrote a powerful version of Unix in his dorm room and distributed it freely over the Internet. It was not quite an accurate reference. The editor phoned because Linus had just been the star attraction -- and mobbed -- at a recent Linux show in San Jose, which prompted the editor to lure me into the assignment with the words, "'We've got a global superstar right here in, uh, Santa Clara." He faxed over some newspaper reports.

Linus had moved to Silicon Valley two years earlier and was working for the then-secretive Transmeta Corporation, which had for years been developing a microprocessor that promised to upend the computer industry. He somehow had a job that allowed him to maintain his time-consuming position as the ultimate leader of Linux and final authority on any changes made to the operating system. (His followers had, in fact, initiated the legal maneuvering that gave him legal ownership of the Linux trademark.) And he had time to trot the globe as poster boy for the burgeoning open source movement.

But he had become something of a mysterious folk hero. While Bill Gates, everybody's favorite nemesis, was living in splendor in his Xanadu, Linus resided with his wife and toddler daughters in a cramped Santa Clara duplex. He apparently was unconcerned about the fabulous wealth that was being rained upon the flocks of less-talented programmers. And his very presence raised an unutterable conundrum among the stock-option-driven minions in Silicon Valley: How could anyone so brilliant possibly be so uninterested in getting rich?

Linus has no handlers, doesn't listen to voice mail, and rarely responds to email. It took weeks for me to get him on the phone, but once I did he easily agreed to an interview at his earliest convenience, which was about a month later: May 1999. Having developed a professional passion for putting interview subjects into compromising positions, I decided that a Finnish sauna might be the perfect backdrop for the profile. In a rented Mustang convertible, with a photographer at the wheel, we headed over to Santa Cruz and what was recommended as the Bay Area's best sauna, which was on the grounds of a New Age/nudist retreat.

He was armed with an opened can of Coke as he emerged from the innards of Transmeta's offices in an anonymous Santa Clara office park. He wore the programmer's uniform of jeans, conference T-shirt, and the inevitable socks-and-sandals combo that he claimed to have favored even before ever meeting another programmer. lilt must be some programmer's law of nature," he reasoned when I asked about the footware choice.

The first question to Linus, as we sat in the backseat, was a throwaway. "Are your folks in technology?" I asked while fiddling with my tape recorder.

"No, they're all basically journalists," he replied, adding: "So I know what scum you are. "

He didn't think he could get away with that.

"Oh. You come from scum?" I responded.

The world's best programmer laughed so hard that he coughed out a spray of Coke onto the back of the photographer-driver's neck. He turned red. This would be the start of a memorable afternoon.

It only got more bizarre. Finns are fanatical about their saunas and this was to be his first visit to one in nearly three years. The pale, naked superstar with steamed-up glasses sat on the highest perch, with his wet tan hair matted down on his face and a river of sweat flowing down what I would later, purely out of good will, describe as his "incipient paunch." He was surrounded by tanned, self-obsessed Santa Cruzans: and their monotonous New Age rantings, and he seemed above it all, eagerly pointing out the authentic features of the sauna. He had this beatific grin on his face.

It's my conviction that, for the most part, people in Silicon Valley are happier than everybody else. For one thing, they're at the control panel of the economic revolution. More importantly, they're all getting insufferably rich, both New Valley and Old Valley. But one never sees people smile there, at least not outside the confines of their brokers' offices.

Most acclaimed technologists -- even most of the unacclaimed ones -- have this immediate desire to let you know how brilliant they are. And that they are critical players in a mission that is far more important than, say, the struggle for world peace. That wasn't the case with Linus. In fact, his lack of ego seemed downright disarming, and made him uniquely likable amid Silicon Valley's bombastic elite. Linus appeared to be above it all. Above the New Agers. Above the high-tech billionaires. He seemed less like a reindeer caught in the global headlights than a delightful alien beamed down to show us the madness of our selfish ways.

And I got the feeling that he didn't get out much.

Linus had earlier mentioned that an important part of the sauna ritual involved sitting around afterward, drinking beer and discussing world affairs. In preparation, we had stashed cans of Fosters in some bushes. We retrieved the beers and settled into the "quiet" hot tub, where we opened the Fosters while the photographer took his pictures. I found Linus to be unexpectedly knowledgeable about American business history and world politics. In his view, the United States would be better served if both corporations and political parties adopted the conciliatory approach of European politicians. He dipped his glasses into the hot tub in order to clean them, mentioning that he really didn't need glasses but started wearing them as an adolescent under the logic that they made his nose look smaller. That's when a clothed female manager appeared at the hot tub and humorlessly ordered us to hand over our beers, which were considered contraband in the otherwise free-spirited surroundings.

Our only option was to shower, dress, and find a cafe for finishing the conversation. Most folks one meets in Silicon Valley have a cult-like zeal about them. They focus so intently on their business or killer application or The Industry that nothing else seems to exist. Nothing interrupts the continuous loop of self-congratulation that passes for conversation. But there we were, sitting in the sun at a microbrewery, sampling the Godawful barleywine, with Linus chattering away like an uncaged canary -- confessing his addiction to Classic Rock and Dean Koontz, revealing his weakness for the dumbest sitcoms, sharing off-the-record family secrets.

And he didn't have any great desire to circulate among the rich and powerful. I asked him what he would like to say to Bill Gates, but he wasn't the least bit interested in even meeting the guy. "There wouldn't be much of a connection point," he reasoned. "I'm completely uninterested in the thing that he's the best in the world at. And he's not interested in the thing that maybe I'm the best in the world at. I couldn't give him advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology. "On the ride back over the mountain to Santa Clara, a black Jeep Cherokee pulled up alongside our car and its passenger yelled "Hey Linus!" and pulled out a throwaway camera to capture his apparent hero, who was sitting in the Mustang convertible's backseat, grinning in the breeze.

I showed up at his house a week later at bathtime. He fished his one-year-old blond daughter out of the tub and needed someplace to deposit her while he fished out his two-year-old blond daughter. He handed the younger daughter tome and she promptly let out a yell. His wife Toue, who had been in another room the entire time, emerged to help. She is on the short side, pleasant, and bears a thistle tattoo on her ankle. Soon we were all reading Swedish and English bedtime books to the kids. Then we stood around in the garage, amid unpacked belongings, where the Torvalds discussed the impossibility of affording "a real house with a real back yard" in Silicon Valley. There was no bitterness about it.

And, magnificently, they didn't appear to see the irony.

Soon we were watching Jay Leno, with cans of Guinness. That's when I realized it made sense to do a book.

V.

And I basically sat in front of a computer for four years.

Okay, there was school: Norssen High, the most central of Helsinki's five Swedish-language high schools, and the one nearest my home. Math and physics were interesting, and therefore easy. But whenever a subject involved rote memorization, my enthusiasm for that subject was diminished. So history was boring when it meant worrying about the date of the Battle of Hastings, but got interesting when you discussed the economic factors affecting a country. The same thing went for geography. I mean, who really cares how many people are in Bangladesh? Well, it might matter to a lot of folks, come to think of it. But the point is, it was far easier for me not to daydream about my computer when we were learning about something more engaging than statistics, like the monsoons, for example, or the reasons for the monsoons.

Phys ed was another matter entirely. I'm probably not breaking any news by revealing that I wasn't the most athletic guy on the Fennoscandia peninsula. I was skinny then, too, believe it or not. Gymnastics was actually okay to participate in. But when we would have soccer or ice hockey, it would be time for me to skip class.

This showed up in my grades. In Finland you get graded on a scale of four to ten. So I would earn tens and some nines for math, physics, biology, and everything else-but sevens for phys ed. Once there was a six. I earned a six in woodworking, too. That wasn't my strong spore, either. Other guys have well-crafted napkin holders or stools as souvenirs of woodworking class. All I have are a few splinters still lodged in my thumb after all these years. This is where it should be mentioned that my father-in-law was the one who built the fine swing set in our backyard on which my daughters spend so many happy hours.

My high school wasn't one of those institutions for exceptionally smart or ambitious kids, which are common in most U.S. cities. Such schools are pretty much against how Finland works. Finnish schools don't separate out the good students -- or the losers, for that matter. However, each school did have its specialty, a subject that was not required but that you couldn't get at any other school. In the case of Norssen High School, it was Latin. And Latin was fun. More fun than learning Finnish and English.

Too bad it's a dead language. I'd love to get together with a few buddies and tell jokes in Latin or maybe discuss operating system design strategies.

It was also fun to spend time in the coffee shop near school. It was a hangout for certain people, basically those who weren't hiding behind the school smoking cigarettes. You would go there instead of phys ed, or you would go there if you had an hour break between classes, which sometimes happened.

The place had been a haven for geeks since the days of slide rules. Also, it was the only cafe that let students buy things on account. That meant you would place your order and they would keep a written list of everything you ate or drank, and then when you somehow got the money together you would pay for it. Knowing the Finnish mania for technology, it's probably all recorded in a database these days.

My order was always the same: a Coke and a doughnut.

So young and already such a health food nut.

Generally speaking, I was better in school than my sister, Sara, who was more sociable, easier to look at, nicer to people and, I should add, has been hired to translate this book into Swedish. But she beat me in the end because she took exams in more subjects. My interests were narrower. I was known as the Math Guy.

In fact, the only time I brought girls home was when they wanted to be tutored. It didn't happen all that many times, and it was never my idea, but my father harbors fantasies that they were interested in more than math tutoring. (In his mind, somehow they had bought into his Stately Nose = Stately Man equation.) If they were looking for any math-guy action, they certainly didn't have a willing partner. I mean, I could never even figure out what they were referring to by "heavy petting." I had spent time taking care of a neighbor's fifteen-pound cat and couldn't figure out what the big deal was.

Yes, I was definitely a geek. No question about it. This is before geekdom became sexy. Well, I guess it's not really sexy but hipper. What you had was someone who was both a geek and shy -- or is that redundant?

So I would be sitting in front of a computer and be perfectly happy.

For high school graduation in Finland, you wear a fluffy white hat with a black band. There's a ceremony in which they hand out diplomas, and when you come home all your relatives are there with lots of champagne, Bowers, and cake. And there's also a party for the entire class at a local restaurant. We did all that, and I guess I had fun, but I don't remember anything special about it. But ask me about the specs on my 68008-chip machine and I can rattle them off with total recall.

VI.

My first year at university was actually quite productive. I managed to earn the number of credits-which are called "study weeks" in the Finnish system-that one is supposed to earn. It was the only year that happened. Maybe it was the excitement of the new environment, or the opportunity to delve deeply into the topics, or because it was more comfortable for me to study than to become a social animal and puke on my friends with ritualistic regularity. I don't know what to blame for my adequate performance in that first year. But rest assured, it didn't happen again. My academic career took a sharp nosedive.

At that point a major hadn't been determined. Eventually computers became my major, with physics and math as minors. One of the problems was that in the entire University of Helsinki there was only one other Swedish-speaking student who wanted to major in computers, Lars Wirzenius. The two of us joined Spektrum, the social organization for Swedish-speaking science students, which actually turned out to be a lot of fun. The club was comprised of students in the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry. Translation: It's all guys.

But we did share our clubroom with the counterpart organization for Swedish-speaking students in the soft sciences, such as biology and psychology. That way, we were able to interact with females, as awkward as it might have been for some of us. Okay, all of us.

Spektrum had many of the trappings of an American-style fraternity, but you didn't have to live with the other guys or ever deal with anyone who wasn't interested in science. We had regular Wednesday night meetings where I learned the difference between a pilsner and an ale. On rare occasions there were vodka-ingesting contests. But much of that didn't happen until later in my university career. And there was ample time for it to happen: I studied at the university for eight years, emerging with nothing more than a mere master's degree. (I'm not counting the honorary doctorate the university issued to me in June 2000.)

But that first year was a blur of streetcar commutes between lecture classes and my bedroom, which was gathering piles of books and computer equipment. I'd lie in bed reading a Douglas Adams sci-fi thriller, then toss it on the floor and pick up a physics text, then roll out of bed and sit at the computer writing a program for a new game. The kitchen is right outside the bedroom and I'd stumble in for some coffee or corn crunchies.

Maybe your sister is somewhere around, or maybe she is out with friends. Or maybe she is living with your father these days. Maybe your mother is there or maybe she is working or maybe she is out with her journalist friends. Or a friend is over and you are wedged into the kitchen, drinking cup after cup of tea and watching Bevis and Butthead in English on MTV and thinking about going somewhere to play snooker but it is just too cold outside.

And happily, there is no phys ed in this lifetime.

That will happen next year. All year. When the Finnish Army calls every male. Many guys do their army duty immediately following high school. For me, instead, it seemed to make more sense to wait until after completing a year at the university.

In Finland you have a choice: You either do the army for eight months or social services for a year. If you show strong religious reasons or some other significant excuse, you could get around both. For me, there wasn't such an out. And the option of social services didn't feel right.

It wasn't because I had anything against helping humanity. It probably had more to do with a fear that social services duty ran the risk of actually being more boring than army duty. I can't believe I'm being so candid. But talk to someone who has gone the social services route and you find that if you haven't already lined up a good place to perform them, you will be randomly assigned to an uninteresting place. And I couldn't conscientiously object. As much as I wouldn't have objected to shirking my patriotic duty, the fact is I actually do have a conscience: When push comes to shove, I don't have strong convictions against guns or killing people.

So if you opt for the army there are two new choices to make. You could go for the required eight months as a regular Joe, or go to officer training school and do eleven months as an officer. It occurred to me that it might be slightly more interesting to be an officer, despite the additional 129,600 minutes. It would also be a way of getting something more out of it.

That's how your (then) 120-pound hero became a second lieutenant in the reserves of the Finnish Army. My job was fire controller. It's not exactly rocket science.You are given the coordinates for the big guns. You read the map of where you are and then you triangulate on where you want to shoot. You do the coordinates calculations and then you radio them in or communicate using telephone wire that you helped layout. You're telling the guns where to shoot.

I remember being very nervous before going into the army, not knowing what to expect. Some people had older brothers or someone to talk to about the army, so they knew what to anticipate. There was nobody to tell me what would be happening. Well, everybody knows in general that the army isn't going to be fun. It's something perpetuated by everybody being there. But I didn't have a clear idea of what it would be like, and that made me nervous. It's sort of how I feel about having people read this book.

The most difficult times in the army involve walking around the Lapland woods with what seem like tons of cable. Frankly, I think it is tons of cable. Before officers school, you would be ordered to run around with a huge roll of cable on your stomach and two on your back, and you have to run for, like, ten freaking miles. Other times you're just standing around waiting for things to happen.

Or you ski for too long to the place where you put up the tent. That's when I realized that if God had meant us to ski, He/She/It would have equipped us with elongated fiberglass pads instead of feet. Wait a second, I don't necessarily believe in God.

Then you have to get the tent set up and the fire going before you can eat. You're cold and hungry and tired because you haven't slept in two days. I understand that people actually pay good money to participate in such extreme outdoor adventures as "character-building experiences." They should just join the Finnish Army.

Actually, the outdoor marathons didn't happen often, but they happened. I calculated that during eleven months with the army, I spent more than 100 days in the woods. Finland has abundant woods: 70 percent of the country is covered with forest. I felt as if I visited it all.

My job as an officer was to be the fire control leader for a group of five. That just means you're supposed to know how things work, and make them seem more complicated than they really are. But it just wasn't that interesting and I wasn't a very good leader. I certainly wasn't good at giving orders. I took them well -- the trick is not to take it personally -- but I didn't feel that it was my mission in life to do the best job.

Not then.

Did I mention how cold it gets in Lapland?

Come to think of it, I really hated it while I was there. But it was one of those things: After it was over it immediately became a wonderful experience.

It also gave me something to discuss with virtually any Finnish male for the rest of my life. In fact, some people suggest that the major reason for the required army duty is to give Finnish men something to talk about over beer for as long as they live. They all have something miserable in common. They hated the Army, but they're happy to talk about it afterward.

VII.

While we're on the subject, let me tell you some more about Finland. We probably have more reindeer than any place on Earth. We also have a healthy share of both alcoholics and fans of tango dancing. Spend a winter in Finland and you understand the roots of all the drinking. There's no excuse for the tangoistas, but, thankfully, they are all pretty much concentrated in small towns, where you never have to encounter them.

A recent survey determined that Finnish males are the most virile in Europe. It must be all the reindeer meat, or the hours spent in saunas. This is a nation that literally is home to more saunas than cars. Nobody actually knows how this religion started, but the tradition, at least in some places, is to build the sauna first, then the house. Many apartment buildings contain a sauna on the first-floor level or the top floor, and every family gets its own private hour-like Thursdays, 7 to 8 P.M. (Thursdays and Fridays tend to be sauna days.) That way, you don't have to endure the horror of seeing your neighbors naked. I was once thumbing through an English-language guidebook to Finland that went to great lengths to warn the reader that Finns never have sex in saunas, and how they would be horrified to learn' that such a violation has taken place or was even a mere fantasy in the tourist's mind. I couldn't stop laughing when I read that, because the sauna is such a neutral place in the Finnish home that the book might just as appropriately have warned against having sex on the kitchen Boor. I don't think it's any big deal. In remote locales babies are born in saunas -- the only places with hot water -- and that's where you go to die, according to some traditions. These rules don't apply to my family, by the way, which has a laid-back approach to the whole thing.

There are other traits that distinguish Finns from other members of the human species. For example, there's this silence tradition. Nobody talks much. They just sort of stand around not saying anything. This is another rule that doesn't apply to my family, which I will generously describe as "offbeat."

Finns are stoic to a fault. Silent suffering and fierce determination might be what helped us survive in the face of domination by Russia, a succession of bloody wars, and weather that sucks. But these days, it just seems odd. The German writer Bertolt Brecht lived briefly in Finland during World War II and made the famous observation about patrons of a railway station cafe there "remaining silent in two languages." He left for the United States via Vladivostock the first chance he could.

Even today, if you step into a bar in any Finnish city -- particularly the smaller ones -- you're likely to find stone-faced men sitting by themselves, staring off into the air. People respect each other's privacy in Finland -- that's another big thing -- so nobody would think of going up to a stranger and striking up a conversation. There's a conundrum. Finns actually are quite friendly. But few people are ever able to find that out.

I understand the atmosphere is much more convivial in Finland's lesbian bars.

Since Finns are loathe to converse face to face, we represent the ideal market for mobile phones. We have taken to the new devices with an enthusiasm unmatched by any other nation. It's not clear which country actually does claim the most reindeer per capita -- the title might go to Norway, come to think of it -- but there's no question which nation on Earth has more cell phones for every man, woman, and child. There's talk in Finland of having them grafted to the body upon birth.

And they are used for more purposes than anywhere else. Finns routinely send each other text messages, or rely on mobile phones as a mechanism for cheating on high school tests (send a friend the question and wait for his text-message reply). We use the calculator function that few Americans even realize exists on a mobile phone. The obvious next step is for folks to start dialing up the number of the lonely person at the next cafe table and strike up a cell conversation. The phenomenal success of Nokia notwithstanding, mobile phones have changed Finland like nothing since the introduction -- long forgotten -- of the sauna itself.

It's actually no surprise that mobile phones would find such a warm reception in Finland. The country has a history of being quick and confident in the adoption of technology. For example, unlike practically everywhere else on Earth, Finland is a place where folks routinely pay bills and conduct all their banking electronically -- none of this wimpy pseudo-electronic banking that takes place in the United States. There are more Internet nodes per capita in Finland than any other country. Some credit this techno-savvy to the strong educational system-Finland has the world's highest literacy rate, and university tuition is free, which is why the typical student sticks around for six or seven years. Or, in my case, eight years. You can't help learning something by hanging around a university for such a large chunk of your life. Others say the technological edge got its start with the infrastructure improvements made in the shipping industry as part of war reparations paid to Russia. And others say it has something to do with a population that is (at times, unbearably) homogeneous.

Linus and I are sitting at the dining room table. we have just returned from a car-racing/batting-cage place. Tove is putting away groceries, Patricia and Daniela are in a tussle over a book I brought for one of them. I brush aside a stuffed penguin and a huge jar of peanut butter, turn on the tape recorder, and ask Linus to talk about his childhood.

"Actually, I don't remember much of my childhood," he says, in a monotone.

"How can that be? It was only a few years ago!"

"Ask Tove: I'm lousy at remembering names or faces or what I did. I have to ask her what our phone numbers are. I remember rules and how things are organized, but I can never remember details of things, and I don't remember the details of my childhood. I don't remember how things happened or what I was thinking when I was small."

"Well, did you have friends, for example?"

"A few. I never was very social. I'm way, way more social now than I was back then. "

"Well, what was it like? I mean, do you remember waking up on a Sunday morning and going somewhere with your sister and your parents?"

"My parents were split up by then."

"How old were you when they split up?"

"l don't know. Maybe six. Maybe ten. I don't remember."

"What about Christmas? Do you remember Christmas?"

"Ob, I have some vague memories of getting dressed up and going to my paternal grandfather's house in Turku. Same thing for Easter. Other than that I don't remember much. "

"What about your first computer?"

"That was the famed VIC-20 my maternal grandfather bought. It came in a box. "

"How big was the box? The size that would hold a pair of snow boots?"

"About that size."

"And what about your grandfather? Do you remember much about him?"

"He was probably my closest relative but I don't... Okay. He was overweight, but not fat. He was balding. He was withdrawn, sort of like an absent-minded professor, which he was. I used to sit on his lap and type in his programs. "

"Can you remember what he smelled like?"

"No. What kind of a question is that?"

"Everybody's grandfather smells like something. Cheap cologne. Bourbon. Cigars. What did he smell like?"

"l don't know. I was too preoccupied with the computer to notice."