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Linus Torvalds : The Creator & the Principal Developer of the Linux Kernel

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Necessity is the key to invention, and the story of Linus Torvalds is the greatest proof to that. A student and an enthusiast programmer from Helsinki University started working on his own Operating System when he was unable to buy a basic UNIX system that costed around US$5,000 at that time. Although it was a modest effort of improving the small clone of UNIX, his creativity and curiosity led him to build a whole new and free OS software, Linux, which accidentally became an alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.

Early Life

Linus Torvalds was born on 28 December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. His father Nils Torvalds and mother Anna Torvalds, both worked as journalists. His parents named him after the Nobel Prize-winning American chemist, Linus Pauling. Torvalds was 11 years old when he got familiar with computers and the BASIC programming language. This was the time when he grew an interest in computers and coding. Soon, he was able to write codes for his own assembler and editor, as Finland was not a place where software were easily available. Later, he also developed a few games, including the clone of Pac Man, naming it the Cool Man.

linus-torvalds
Image Source: zdnet.com

Torvalds joined the University of Helsinki in 1988, where he studied Computer Science as his majors. But within the first year of his college, he joined the Finnish Army Uusimaa brigade and completed the 11-month officer training program, as the Second Lieutenant, under the mandatory military service of Finland.

After completing the military training, Torvalds came back to his home town, to resume his college. While in college, he got introduced to Unix for the first time. At the same time, he also started studying a book named ‘Operating Systems: Design and Implementation’, written by the computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum, which described the educational stripped-down version of Unix, ‘MINIX’.

Founding Linux

In 1991, he bought the Intel 80386-based clone of IBM PC, having a 33MHz Intel 386 processor and a huge 4MB of memory. The system came with the MS-DOS operating system, that according to Torvalds did not do justice with the 386 Intel Processor. As he was already working on UNIX in the college, he was not much comfortable with working on MS-DOS but getting a UNIX copy too expensive. This led him to the other alternative for the OS, and he ordered a copy of MINIX for his system.

MINIX was faster than MS-DOS but still had some flaws. So he decided to make some changes to MINIX in order to improve the OS. To work on the idea, even before receiving his MINIX copy, he went into the depth of Unix and studied books covering all the aspects of the development phase. He started with writing a small piece of code that could improve MINIX. This also became the M.Sc. thesis project for Torvalds, and he titled the project as ‘Linux: A Portable Operating System.’

On Aug. 25, he posted to the internet’s Minix newsgroup, saying, “Hello everybody out there using MINIX – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) for 386 (486) AT clones. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in MINIX, as my OS resembles it somewhat.”

Eventually, with great hard work, Torvalds managed to release the first version of the OS, i.e. 1.0, on September 17, followed by the second version, i.e. 2.0, on October 5, in the same year. The second version OS was a text-based user interface and was officially named as Linux. Torvalds put the 0.2 version over FTP and used Stallman’s GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) for his Linux kernel so that other developers could use it and modify it for further improvements.

Developers from across the world also became curious about Linux, started working on the same, resulting in rapid improvements to the platform. Even being a student at Helsinki University, Torvalds was doing really well. The college authorities appointed him as an instructor at the University, which helped him continue his development work for Linux.

By 1996, people started using Linux on their systems, and by 1997, Linux was installed on over three million computers. Organisations like NASA, Dell and IBM were also using Linux. At the same time, Red Hat started building software based on Linux, that boosted the popularity of Linux even more.

In 1999, when Red Hat went public, the company presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation, making him an overnight millionaire. Also, when IBM started its research work on Linux in 2001, to support this free software, a few other companies also stepped in to do the same.

Today, Linux is serving those people, who need to use a computer, but cannot and does do not want to spend a huge amount on the other operating systems. According to Torvalds, he started working on Linux for fun, and it is also a fact that for almost a decade, he was working on it for free. Linux, certainly, is the result of his dedication and brilliance.

Personal Life

Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds and has three daughters. In 2010, he obtained US citizenship. In 2000, he became interested in scuba diving and have received many certificates in the same. He also launched Subsurface, a software for logging and planning scuba dives, in 2011.

In 1998, Torvalds received an EFF Pioneer Award. He also shared the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura. In August 2005, Torvalds received the Vollum Award from Reed College. He also received an honorary doctorate degree from Stockholm University.

Torvalds also founded the distributed version control system Git, in 2005. The system is widely used to track the changes in source code during software development.

The Story of Hatch Apps : The App To Build Apps

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There are rare cases when your honesty and realization of your fundamental duty would have paid you well. Yes, you might have received appreciation from people, but did it become the biggest business idea for you ever?

This is what happened to the Param Jaggi, who is the co-founder of Hatch App. Param Jaggi is of Indian descent, who dropped out of Vanderbilt University at the age of 19, to work for his own self. He was a brilliant student and even invented EcoTube when he was in school at the age of 16. The EcoTube was built under a science project, that used the algae photosynthesis to reduce carbon emissions from cars. The device worked well and Jaggi patented the device in his name. Jaggi’s father is an engineer and wanted him to become a doctor. But as Jaggi was already working for a better cause, i.e., saving the environment, his family never interfered. Jaggi also sold his innovative bio-fuel preparation method to a Fortune 500 company.

AmeliaParam
Image Source: thewholetruthbooth.com

During the same time, he also developed an interest in web development, and later, when he turned 19, he decided to work as a freelancer, as he was already developing web and mobile apps and was earning enough. At that time he was charging $10K to $30 to build simple apps and that too only in a time equal to a weekend. For Jaggi, it had become quite easy to copy paste the similar code in the background of each web app and finish the project within a week. This fact made him think that he was charging way too much for delivering the ‘almost same’ code to every other client. “What’s fundamentally wrong with the software development industry, especially custom development systems, is that they price out products based on your price elasticity”, said Jaggi in an interview.

On the other hand, the other co-founder of Hatch Apps, Amelia Friedman, was also an entrepreneur who started her own business when she was still in college. She was a student of Brown University and was running college-level programs in different languages. At the time she completed her graduate degree, her program had reached to 7 cities, with over 32 different programs.

Founding Hatch Apps

Jaggi was a 19-years old eco-innovator, and Friedman was a self-made entrepreneur. The two got a chance to attend the Halcyon Incubator in Washington, DC, where the two met each other, the very first time. The meeting included the discussion over many things including how Jaggi wanted to bring price stability to the app building industry. And the idea of Hatch Apps was formed.

Jaggi’s plan was clear. He wanted to create a platform, upon which people could build their own apps without paying extra money. In 2015, the two launched Hatch Apps and started working on the basic plan. At the same time, the need for extra funds arisen. So they developed the 2016 Election game in just three days and were able to raise $100,000 for Hatch Apps within a few weeks.

The Hatch Apps is one of its kind, where a user can build apps by just dragging and dropping the elements, without actually knowing the coding behind those elements. During the testing of the app, Jaggi built the first app on Hatch Apps, just in three days even having the deadline of five days.

In March 2017, this software company raised $1.3M in angel funding to launch their product. The company has a team of more than twenty people and charges only $1K a month for app development. For $2K to $5K, customers can implement specific customizations and add-ons.

Jaggi is working as the CEO of Hatch Apps, and Friedman holds the position of the COO of the company. Jaggi has also got his name listed twice in the Forbes “30 Under 30”.

The company is still managing its ways in the market and slowly is getting ahead to earn more consumers. For now, the idea is really innovative and one of its kind, so the future of the company looks quite bright.

Zipcar : The Success Story of One of the Oldest Car-rental Services

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Zipcar has a history even before the car-renting businesses were not even that common. Built by two moms, the idea at the time was unique, and it was their passion that made it successful in just a few months.

Zipcar is an almost 2 decades old company, founded in the year 2000, by Antje Danielson, a Harvard geochemist and Robin Chase, a stay-at-home mom and an MIT business school graduate. The two ladies met each other at their children’s kindergarten, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both were struggling financially, as Chase had left her job due to the birth of her first child and Danielson was the only working member in her family.

zipcar
Image Source: wright.edu

But as the time was passing both of them wanted to make use of their studies, and as a business graduate, Chase has expressed her desire to start a business with Danielson. Danielson was on the same track and had studied about Switzerland’s Mobility Cooperative, and shared the idea of starting a similar technology based car-rental company, in the US, with Chase. Chase also liked the idea, but it was a big project that included a huge risk. So both talked to their husbands and got the approval for the business.

Finally, in January 2000, both started their car-rental business, Zipcar. Zipcar provided the automobile reservations to its members through charging them a monthly or annual fee. Before incorporating the company, the two had already raised investments for its launch of around $75,000 in startup financing. After they launched the startup, Chase held the position of the president of Zipcar and Danielson became the vice president of the company.

The first rental car from Zipcar went onto the roads in May 2000, and in just three-four months it registered over 600 customers for the service. The company was doing well, but the two co-founders were not going along too well. In 2001, Robin Chase fired Danielson, after Chase petitioned Zipcar’s board for the ability to make hiring and firing decisions without consulting them.

The fire of the co-founder did not impact the company much, and it kept on expanding in New York City and Washington DC. Even the company was expanding, it was unable to secure more funding, and as a result, the board of the company replaced Chase as the CEO of the company with Scott Griffith. Within two years the company was able to raise $10 million in funding led by Benchmark Capital. In the same year, a new office was opened in San Francisco, following by another office in Toronto in the next year. The establishment of Toronto led to the fastest growing market in Toronto for Zipcar.

In late 2006, the company reached London, and in 2007, Zipcar opened an office in Vancouver. In the same year, in the month of October, the company had a merger with Flexcar. After the merger, the company earned over 225,000 members, double the number of the member it had in the previous year.

In June 2009, the company launched its iPhone app, with the features like honking the horn and unlocking some Zipcars. In April 2010, Zipcar acquired the London-based car-sharing club Streetcar.

In 2013, Avis Budget Group acquired Zipcar. In 2014, the company opened its offices in Houston, Dallas TX regions, Greater Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. In the same year, the company also extended to Paris, France and Madrid, Spain. Zipcar also launched its floating car-sharing service in Brussels, Belgium, in 2016.

Zipcar offers the car rental service for over fifty different car models, even including the luxury car models like Audi and BMW. The company headquarters still remains in Boston, Massachusetts and it has raised to over 500 employees.

The reason behind the success has been that it started through word-of-mouth promotion and had invested well in the technology. The business idea was simple and was based on customer feedback. So in the past two decades, it has grown in a phenomenal way. Even it has been more than a decade for the two co-founders left the company, Zipcar had its own success story. And, the success story of Zipcar shows us that keeping things simple and targeting customer satisfaction is the key to success.

Simon Nixon: The Founder of ‘MoneySuperMarket’

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Today’s market brings so much to its consumers. It’s hard to decide what to choose and why because there is a lot of companies out there selling their products and services. We get to see so many products with almost the same quality and the same prices, making it difficult what to choose. But with every problem comes a solution and for this problem, Moneysupermarket gives you ‘the’ proper solution, giving answers to all your questions. Simon Nixon, the man who gave birth to the company, has a story to be heard which says that following someone’s steps may not always be the right way to success.

Moneysupermarket.com stands out to be a British price comparison website. The work that the site does is that it helps you to compare prices. You can compare prices on a wide range of products be it an insurance or a loan. The company’s aim is to help households save money.

“This ambition is perfectly suited to the times in which we live, given the financial uncertainty that exists at home. We aim to help by shining a light on the best ways, households can take control of their finances. Our objective is to offer consistently competitive prices and deliver a great visitor experience, so that customers find what they want, and think of us first for their future needs”, itself, the site says.

simonnixon
Image Source: standard.co.uk

It all started back when Simon Nixon found his university education really boring. “I hated it. It was boring,” said Simon when asked why he dropped out of his university. He looked into the market the lacks and gaps, and where he could use his mind to fill them up. Eventually, he found out that there were no websites or journals to compare the prices of the products out in the market. He thought to himself, ‘If I didn’t do this, who else will?’ He started a journal-ish thing that had best-but tables in it. Initially, he lent them out for free but as the magazine gained popularity, he started charging 11 Pounds for a monthly subscription. His business became so efficient that only after two years, he started earning more than 10,000 pounds from that magazine only. Nixon named the group working with him as ‘Mortgage 2000.’

He, along with his friend Duncan Cameron, launched an internet site called ‘Moneysupermarket.com’ which updated itself according to the market daily. The site came out to be a huge success as the internet was blooming all over the world and the UK was no exception. Since then, the site only grew and never saw a backdrop. They kept on increasing their range of products that could be compared.

It was 2004 when Simon Nixon launched Travelsupermarket.com. The site was the same as the Moneysupermarket. The difference was that the users could now compare travel related products too. However, Duncan and Simon fell out as the attention diverted away from Mortgage 2000. In 2007, he (Duncan) sold his shares to Simon for 162 Million Pounds. All these years, Duncan stayed as a silent business partner.

Some of the major sales growth of the company was from 2000 to 2002, where the site jumped from 5.4 million to 13.6 million Pounds. The company was listed in London Stock Exchange, and the site was valued at a massive amount of 1 Billion Pounds, at the time of its Initial Public Offering!

In 2009, Simon stepped down from the position of CEO, with Peter Plumb becoming the new CEO. Simon is fond of luxuries. Also, he admits that he doesn’t like doing business for a long time. “I’m scared of doing nothing,” said Simon, during an interview. Simon has a worth of $1.1 Billion. Even after having so much wealth and businesses, Simon prefers to stay quiet when it comes to his personal life, and there are very little details known about it. Now, he invests in different businesses across the world, which gives him access to travel to different parts of the world too.

Simon Nixon, the founder of Moneysupermarket.com shows us that it only takes true passion to reach your goal. Sometimes, hard work may not count up as much as passion does. Also, it isn’t required that you follow a guided roadmap to success, instead, take your own route and make a path of success out of it.

Nick Woodman : The Founder of Sports-camera Manufacturing Company ‘GoPro’

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Trying, trying, and trying, this is the basic rule to achieve your goals. If you fail once, you have to try harder next time, as giving up will lead you to nowhere, but failure. Except, if you keep trying, there will be a day when you will thank yourself for your own hard work and sustainability. The American businessman Nick Woodman also believes in the power of trying, and after failing in his first two startups, his third startup, ‘Go Pro‘, helped him achieve his dreams, and he finally, built a billion-dollar empire for himself.

Early Life

Woodman was born on 24 June 1975 to Concepcion Woodman and Dean Woodman. He spent his childhood in Menlo Park and Atherton, California. His father founded the Robertson Stephens, an investment bank based in San Francisco. He did his high school from Menlo School. He then attended the University of California, San Diego, where he graduated in visual arts, with a minor in creative writing in 1997.

Experimenting with Startups

Woodman was always curious about starting up his own business, for that he began with an eCommerce website named EmpowerAll.com, which was outlined to sell electronic goods for no more than a $2 profit. But the website could do well for him. Later, he launched a gaming and marketing platform, Funbug, again which could not live up to the mark.

Founding GoPro

It was then when he was travelling to Australia and Indonesia for a trip. He loves surfing, and while surfing in Australia during the tour, he tried to capture his adventure on the camera. He asked his friends to click his pictures while surfing, but they all failed. Later, he tried to take the pictures himself by attaching the camera to his hands with a rubber band, but again it was all in vain.

nick woodman
Image Source: engadget.com

This incident led him to brainstorm about developing ways to help people with such needs. The idea of developing cameras that can be attached with a belt came into his mind, and Woodman went forward to do the needful to transform the idea into a big business plan.

Woodman borrowed a sewing machine from his mother and started experimenting with different designs to formulate belts for cameras. He also took a loan of $2,00,000 from his father and $35000 from his mother in order to start the business. He also invested his savings, around $10000, obtained from selling the sea-shells, that he had brought from Bali and sold in the California coast, in his startup.

In 2002, he founded GoPro. The name was inspired by the Pro surfers who got their pictures clicked by professional photographers. Initially, the company focussed on developing camera models with ‘point and shoot’ property, in order to get high-quality pictures instantly.

The first model from the company was manufactured by a Chinese company named Hotax. The model was a 35mm film camera, attached with the belt designed by Woodman himself, after a few modifications in the design. The retail cost for the camera was set at $30. In the beginning, he went to sell his camera on his 1971 model Volkswagen bus. With the success of the camera, it went through a few improvements like support for Wifi, waterproof housing and addition of SD card.

After two years from the inception of the company, it got its first big order in 2004, from a Japanese company. In the same year, the total earned revenue of the company was $150,000 and the following year, it raised to $350,000.

In late 2012, Foxconn spent $200 million to purchase 8.88% of the company, making the company value at $2.25 billion and Woodman a billionaire. In the year 2014, the company went public.

Personal Life

Woodman is married to Jill R. Scully and has three children with her. The family lives in Woodside, California. In 2013, he won the national Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. He has also been invited to many events as a speaker, to share his experience and some tips as a successful entrepreneur.

Woodman is also in philanthropy and has founded Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation, a charitable trust in the Silicon Valley.

Brendan Eich : The Founder Of JavaScript; A Buggy but Irreplaceable Programming Language

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The websites, the web pages, the web applications are most common things that we see today, and they might not seem that fascinating to us, as much it could a decade ago. Also, it might seem a bit easy to create them, but the amount of work that is done behind the scenes is something that people from the non-technical field may hardly understand. These dynamic websites and web applications are the results of JavaScript, which is a high-level interpreted programming language. JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich who shares a story about hard work and creativity. Brendan developed JavaScript in just over 10 days which clearly represents his hard work and passion to do so.

Brendan grew up in Palo Alto. He graduated from Ellwood P. Cubberley High School and received a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Santa Clara University. He then pursued his master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After completing his education, he started working at Silicon Graphics. He worked there for 7 years on Operating Systems and Network Codes.

Brendan Eich
Image Source: cnet.com

Brendan, soon, joined Netscape Communication Corporation, in April 1995. Netscape was a visionary company and wanted to put out something different in their internet browsers. All the existing technologies at that time, like HTML, stood out as deficient when it came to their vision. Due to this, Brendon was tasked to create a whole new language for Netscape. All that he got was 10 days to complete the task. “Back then, the pace of Web innovation was furious, with Microsoft suddenly making the Internet the focus of its Windows 95 operating system release in response to Netscape’s emerging browser and server products,” said Brendon in an interview. After 10 days, completing a nearly impossible task, Brendon came up with ‘JavaScript’. The language was used in Netscape’s Navigator 2.0 Beta version. The browser was named as Mocha, later renamed to LiveScript and then JavaScript.

“When I joined Netscape, I knew that either it will die, and Microsoft will completely replace it, or it will stay for 24 years or longer. Eventually, people think about Pcs and Operating software, like Windows on them, and they think that we will die every 10 years or so, and it doesn’t”, said Brendon in a talk (Source: “Brief History of JavaScript”). “Eich has unique language writing skills and they were unique,” said Jim Clark who was the founder of Silicon Graphics. The language that he created now is the most extensively used programming language in the world and is one of the three core technologies of the World Wide Web.

The creator of JavaScript was already familiar with writing creative programming languages. During his student times, he built new languages that were used to experiment with syntaxes. At Silicon Graphics too, he worked on new and innovative network monitoring tools.

However, Brendan openly admits that the language still has bugs, and he has been constantly working on it. “It was also an incredible rush job, so there were mistakes in it.” “But the point is that it is really hard to replace. There’s something like successful DNA about JavaScript. Once it’s in there, you’re going to have a hard time getting rid of it,” said Brendon.

Alongside JavaScript, he co-founded ‘Mozilla’ project which was a site that handled open source contribution to the Netscape source code. He served as the CTO of Mozilla Corporation. He passed on the ownership of the Mozilla SpiderMonkey module, in 2011. Mozilla Firefox is one of the great browsers that world today has, in which Brendon holds a large amount of contribution. As of now, Brendan Eich is the CEO of Brave software, which is an open-source web browser. There are many things which makes Brave, a unique browser. It is designed to block ads and trackers to protect users’ data, and it boosts browsing speed up to 8 times that of the original ones.

Brave even has its own currency: a blockchain-based token called the Basic Attention Token (BAT). The BAT token was launched via a record-breaking initial coin offering (ICO) on May 31st, 2017. The company raised $35 million by selling out 1.5 billion BAT tokens in just 30 seconds — the fastest ICO on record. All it does is that it offers the Brave users to experience more features of Brave, that is an ad-free experience. Brave is unlike all the tech giants and provides no breaching of data of consumers. Brendan Eich, the founder of JavaScript, co-founder of Mozilla Foundation and the CEO of Brave software shares a story that shows true passion and hard work. Brendan is certainly an inspiration to all the technology geeks out there.