Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Benedict Torvalds

somewhat more useful, but it still was a fairly small sum of money; more than anything else, this was a way of maintaining the tradition of giving out money every year. Finland takes its academic traditions seriously, which is a good thing.
    So I would receive these stipends every year for being the Math Guy. By high school the awards got bigger. The biggest ones were on the order of $500. So that’s where most of the money for my second computer came from; my weekly allowance wouldn’t have paid for a computer. I also borrowed some money from my dad.
    It was 1986 or 1987. I was sixteen or seventeen. My basketball years were behind me. I spent an inordinate amount of time researching the field before deciding which computer to buy. PCs weren’t very good back then, so when I fantasized about my new machine I knew it wasn’t going to be a PC.
    I opted for a Sinclair QL, which many of you are probably too young to remember. Here’s the history. The Sinclair was one of the first 32-bit machines on the market for home use. Sir Clive Sinclair, the founder of the company, was the Steve Wosniak of Britain. He made these computer kits that were sold as Timex computers in the United States. That’s right, the same company that made Timex watches imported the Sinclair computer stuff and sold it here under the Timex name. The early ones were sold as kits before he started selling ready-made computers.
    The Sinclair had this operating system called Q-DOS. I knew it by heart back then. It was written especially for that particular computer. It had quite an advanced Basic for the time, and fairly good graphics. One of the things that excited me the most about the operating system was that it was multitasking: You could run multiple programs at once. However, the Basic part wasn’t multitasking, so you couldn’t run more than one Basic program at once. But if you wrote your own programs in assembly language, you could let the operating system schedule them and time slice it so you could run many of them at the same time.
    The computer contained the 8-megahertz 68008 chip, which was the second and cheaper version of Motorola’s 68000 chip. Internally, the first generation of 68000 chips were 32-bit, but externally had a 16-bit interface to anything outside the CPU (central processing unit)—such as memory or hardware add-ons. Because it could only load 16 bits at a time from memory, 16-bit operations were often quicker than the 32-bit operations. The architecture was hugely popular and it still exists today in a lot of embedded devices or cars. It’s not the same chip, but it’s based on the same architecture.
    The 68008 chip, the version in my computer, used 8 bits, not 16 bits, for its interface with the world outside the CPU. But even though it interacted with the outside world at 8 bits at a time, internally it was 32 bits. That made it more pleasant to program in many ways.
    It had 128 kilobytes of memory—not megabytes—which was huge at the time for a home machine. The VIC-20 it replaced had only 31/2 kilobytes of memory. And because it was a 32-bit machine it could access all the memory with no problem at all, which was unheard of back then. That was the main reason I wanted to buy the computer. The technology was interesting and I loved the CPU.
    I was hoping to get the computer at a discount by buying it at a store where a friend knew the owners. But it would have taken so long for the computer to arrive that I just shlogged down to Akademiska Bokhandeln, the largest bookstore in Helsinki, which had a computer section. I just bought it from them over the counter.
    The computer cost nearly $2,000. There used to be this rule that entry-level computers were always $2,000. It’s only in the last couple of years that this has changed. Now you can buy a new PC for $500. It’s like cars. Nobody makes cars for under $10,000. At some point, it’s not worth it anymore. Sure, companies can build a car that can be sold for