By sharing software,
hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual
motivations such as greed or ego protection.
Like many programmers of his generation, Torvalds had
cut his teeth not on mainframe computers like the IBM
7094, but on a motley assortment of home-built computer
systems. As university student, Torvalds had made the
step up from C programming to Unix, using the
university's MicroVAX. This ladder-like progression had
given Torvalds a different perspective on the barriers
to machine access. For Stallman, the chief barriers
were bureaucracy and privilege. For Torvalds, the chief
barriers were geography and the harsh Helsinki winter.
Forced to trek across the University of Helsinki just
to log in to his Unix account, Torvalds quickly began
looking for a way to log in from the warm confines of
his off-campus apartment.
The search led Torvalds to the operating system Minix,
a lightweight version of Unix developed for
instructional purposes by Dutch university professor
Andrew Tanenbaum.
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