Chapter One

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 lessincriminating 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 28th 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.

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