Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.” As a 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 up on 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