Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (3 page)

And I started reading the manuals for the computer, typing in the example programs. There were examples of simple games that you could program yourself. If you did it right you wound up with a guy that walked across the screen, in bad graphics, and then you could change it and make the guy walk across the screen in different colors. You could just
do
that.

It’s the greatest feeling.

I started writing my own. The first program I wrote was the first program everybody else starts out with:

10 PRINT “HELLO”

20 GOTO 10

This does exactly what you expect it to do. It prints out HELLO on the screen. Forever. Or at least until you kill it out of boredom.

But it’s the first step. Some people stop there. To them, it’s a stupid exercise because why would you want to print out HELLO a million times? But it was invariably the first example in the manuals that came with those early home computers.

And the magic thing is that you can change it. My sister tells me that I made a radical second version of this program that didn’t just write out HELLO, but instead wrote SARA IS THE BEST on the screen, over and over again. Ordinarily I wasn’t such a loving older brother. Apparently the gesture made a big impression on her.

I don’t remember doing it. As soon as I wrote a program I would forget about it and move on to the next one.

III

Let me tell you about Finland. Sometime in October the skies turn an unpleasant shade of gray, and it always looks as if it will either rain or snow. You wake up every day to this gloominess of anticipation. The rain will be chilly and it will rinse away any evidence of summer. When the snow comes, it has that magical quality of making everything bright and painting the place with a veneer of optimism. The trouble is, the optimism lasts about three days but the snow remains for month after bone-numbingly cold month.

By January you sort of wander around in a shadowy daze, if you choose to go outside. It’s a season of moist, bulky clothes and slipping on the ice hockey rink they created by hosing down the grammar school field you traverse as a short-cut to the bus. On Helsinki streets it means dodging the occasional tottering matron who was probably somebody’s gracious grandmother back in September but by 11 A.M. on a Tuesday in January is weaving on the sidewalks from her vodka breakfast. Who can blame her? It will be dark again in a few hours, and there isn’t a lot to do. But there was an indoor sport that got me through the winter: programming.

Morfar (the Swedish word for “Mother’s Father”) would be there much of the time, but not all the time. He doesn’t mind if you sit in his room when he’s away. You beg up the money for your first computer book. Everything is in English and it is necessary to decode the language. It’s difficult to understand technical literature in a language you don’t really know that well. You use your allowance to buy computer magazines. One of them contains a program for Morse code. The odd thing about this particular program is that it’s not written in the BASIC language. Instead, it’s written as a list of numbers that could be translated by hand to machine language—the zeros and ones that the computer reads.

That’s how you discover that the computer doesn’t really speak BASIC. Instead it operates according to a much more simple language. Helsinki kids are playing hockey and skiing with their parents in the woods. You’re learning how a computer actually works. Unaware that programs exist to translate human-readable numbers into the zeros and ones that a computer understands, you just start writing programs in number form and do the conversions by hand. This is programming in machine language, and by doing it you start to do things you wouldn’t have thought possible before. You are able to push what the computer can do. You control every single small detail. You start to think about how you can do things slightly faster in a smaller space. Since there’s no abstraction layer between you and the computer, you get fairly close. This is what it’s like to be intimate with a machine.

You’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen, whatever. Other kids are out playing soccer. Your grandfather’s computer is more interesting. His machine is its own world, where logic rules. There are maybe three people in class with computers and only one of them uses it for the same reasons. You hold weekly meetings. It’s the only social activity on the calendar, except for the occasional computer sleepover.

And you don’t mind. This is fun.

This is after the divorce. Dad lives in another part of Helsinki. He thinks his kid should have more than one interest, so he signs you up for basketball, his favorite sport. This is a disaster. You’re the runt of the team. After a season and a half, you use all sorts of nasty language to tell him you’re quitting, that basketball is
his
sport, not yours. Your new half-brother, Leo, will be more athletic. Then, too, he will eventually become Lutheran, like 90 percent of the Finnish population. That’s when Dad, the staunch agnostic, realized he might be a failure as a parent—something he suspected years earlier, when Sara joined the Catholic church.

The grandfather with the computer isn’t really a jolly sort. He’s balding, slightly overweight. He literally is something of an absent-minded professor and kind of hard to approach. He’s just not an extrovert. Picture a mathematician who would stare out into space and not say anything while he was thinking about something. You could never tell what he was thinking about. Complexity analysis? Mrs. Sammalkorpi down the hall? I’m the same way—famous for zoning out. When I’m sitting in front of the computer, I get really upset and irritable if somebody disturbs me. Tove could elaborate on this point.

My most vivid memories of Morfar take place not at his computer but at his little red cottage. In Helsinki it used to be common for people to keep a small summer place consisting of maybe a single thirty-foot by thirty-foot room. The little houses are on a tiny plot of land, maybe 150 square feet, and people go there to tinker in their gardens. They typically have an apartment in the city and then this little place to grow potatoes or tend a few apple trees or cultivate roses. It’s usually older people because younger ones are busy working. These people get ridiculously competitive about whatever it is they are growing. That’s where Morfar planted my apple tree, a small sapling. Maybe it’s still there, unless it became so abundant that an envious neighbor snuck onto his property during the brief summer darkness and chopped it down.

Four years after introducing me to computers, Morfar develops a blood clot in his brain and becomes paralyzed on one side. It’s a shock to everyone. He’s in the hospital for about a year and he’s the closest family you have, but it doesn’t affect you that much. Maybe it’s defensive or maybe it’s just because you’re so insensitive when you’re young. He is absolutely not the same person anymore and you don’t like going to see him. You go maybe every two weeks. Your mother goes more often. So does your sister, who early on assumed the role of the family social worker.

After he dies, the machine comes to live with you. There isn’t any real discussion about it.

IV

Let’s step back for a moment.

Finland might be the hippest country on Earth right now, but centuries ago, it was little more than a stopover for Vikings as they “traded” with Constantinople. Later, when the neighboring Swedes wanted to pacify the Finns, they sent in English-born Bishop Henry, who arrived in the year 1155 on a mission for the Catholic church. Those proselytizing Swedes manned the Finnish fortresses to ward off the Russians, and eventually won against the empire to our East in the struggle for control. To spur population of the Finnish colony in the following centuries, Swedes were offered land and tax incentives. Swedes ran the show until 1714, when Russia took over for a seven-year interlude. Then Sweden won back its colony until 1809, when Russia and Napoleon attacked Finland; it remained under Russian control until the Communist Revolution in 1917. Meanwhile, the descendants of the early Swedish immigrants are the 350,000 Swedish speakers in Finland today, a group that represents about five percent of the population.

Including my wacky family.

My maternal great-grandfather was a relatively poor farmer from Jappo, a small town near the city of Vasa. He had six sons, at least two of whom earned Ph.D.’s. That says a lot about the prospects for advancement in Finland. Yes, you get sick of the winter darkness and taking off your shoes upon entering a house. But you can get a university education for free. It’s a far cry from what happens in the United States, where so many kids grow up with a sense of hopelessness. One of those six sons was my grandfather, Leo Waldemar Törnqvist, the fellow who introduced me to computing.

Then there was my paternal grandfather. He was the fellow who concocted the name Torvalds, fashioning it out of his middle name. He was named Ole Torvald Elis Saxberg. My grandfather had been born fatherless (Saxberg was his mother’s maiden name) and was given the last name Karanko by the gentleman my great-grandmother eventually married. Farfar (“Father’s father”) didn’t like the guy, enough so he changed his name. He dropped the last name and added an “s” to Torvald on the theory that this made it sound more substantial. Torvald on its own means “Thor’s domain.” He should have started from scratch, because what the adding of an “s” does is destroy the meaning of the root name, and confuse both Swedish-and Finnish-speaking people, who don’t know how the heck to pronounce it. And they think it should be spelled Thorwalds. There are twenty-one Torvalds in the world, and we’re all related. We all endure the confusion.

Maybe that’s why I’m always just “Linus” on the Net. “Torvalds” is just too confusing.

This grandfather didn’t teach at a university. He was a journalist and poet. His first job was as editor-in-chief of a small-town newspaper about 100 kilometers west of Helsinki. He got sacked for drinking on the job with a little too much regularity. His marriage to my grandmother broke down. He moved to the city of Turku in Southwestern Finland, where he remarried and finally became editor-in-chief of the newspaper and published several books of poetry, although he always struggled with a drinking problem. We would visit him there for Christmas and Easter, and to see my grandmother, too. Farmor Märta lives in Helsinki, where she is known for making killer pancakes.

Farfar died five years ago.

Okay: I’ve never read any of his books. It’s a fact that my father points out to total strangers.

Journalists are everywhere in my family. Legend has it that one of my great-grandfathers, Ernst von Wendt, was a journalist and novelist who was on the White side and arrested by the Reds during the Finnish Civil War that followed our independence from Russia in 1917. (Okay. I never read his books, either, and am told I’m not missing much.) My father, Nils (known to everyone as Nicke), is a television and radio journalist who was active in the Communist Party since he was a college student in the 1960s. He developed his political leanings when he learned about some of the atrocities committed against communist sympathizers in Finland. Decades later he admits that his enthusiasm for communism may have been born out of naivete. He met my mother Anna (known as Mikke) when they were both rebellious university students in the 1960s. His story is that they were on an outing for a club of Swedish-speaking students, of which he was president. He had a rival for my mother’s attention, and as they were preparing for the return bus trip to Helsinki, he instructed the rival to oversee the loading of the bus. He used the occasion to grab the seat next to my mother and convince her to go out with him. (And people call me the family genius!)

I was born more or less between campus protests, probably with something like Joni Mitchell playing in the background. Our family love nest was a room in my grandparents’ apartment. A laundry basket served as my first crib. Thankfully, that period isn’t easy to remember. Sometime around my three-month birthday, Papa signed up for his required eleven-month Army service rather than go to jail as the conscientious objector he probably was. He became such a good soldier and such an excellent marksman that he was rewarded with frequent weekend leave privileges. The family tale is that my sister Sara was conceived during one of those conjugal visits. When my mother wasn’t juggling two blondhaired rugrats, she worked as an editor on the foreign desk at the Finnish News Agency. Today she works as a graphics editor.

It’s all part of the journalism mini-dynasty that I miraculously escaped. Sara has her own business translating reports for the news, and she also works at the Finnish News Agency. My half-brother, Leo Torvalds, is a video-type person who wants to direct films. Because my family members are basically all journalists, I feel qualified to joke with reporters about knowing what scum they are. I’m aware that I come off as a complete jerk when I say that, but over the years our home in Finland hosted its share of reporters who stopped at nothing to get their story, or who made up their stories from scratch, or who always seemed to have had just a little too much to drink. Okay: a lot too much to drink.

That’s when it would be time to hide out in the bedroom. Or maybe Mom is having an emotional rough spot. We live in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an unremarkable pale yellow building on Stora Robertsgatan, in Rödbergen, a small area near the center of Helsinki. Sara and her obnoxious sixteen-month-older brother share a bedroom. There’s a small park nearby, named after the Sinebrychoff family, which owns a local brewery. That has always struck me as being odd, but is it any different from naming a basketball stadium after an office products vendor? (Because a cat had once been seen there, Sinebrychoffsparken was henceforth known in my family as the “Catpark.”) There’s a vacant little house there in which pigeons would gather. The park is built on a hill, and in the winter it’s a place to sled. Another play area is the cement courtyard behind our building, or on the building itself. Whenever we play hide-and-seek, it’s fun to climb the ladder five stories up to the roof.