Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (4 page)

But no fun could compare to computer fun. With the computer at home, it was possible to stay up all night with it. Every boy stays up “reading”
Playboy
under the bedcovers. But instead of reading
Playboy
I would fake sleeping, wait for Mom to go away, jump up and sit in front of the computer. This was before the era of chatrooms.

“
Linus, it’s food time!”
Some of the time you don’t even come out. Then your mother starts telling her journalist friends that you are such a low-maintenance child that all she has to do to keep you happy is store you in a dark closet with a computer and occasionally throw in some dry pasta. She’s not far off the mark. Nobody was worried about this kid getting kidnapped. (Hmmm. Would anybody have noticed?) Computers were actually better for kids when they were less sophisticated, when dweebie youngsters like me could tinker under the hood. These days, computers suffer from the same problem as cars: As they became more complex, they became more difficult for people to take apart and put back together, and, as a result, learn what they are all about. When was the last time you did anything on your car more involved than changing the oil filter?

Instead of tinkering under the metaphoric hoods of their computers, kids these days are playing too many games, and losing their minds. Not that there’s anything wrong with games. They were some of my earliest programs.

There was one in which you were controlling a small submarine in a grotto. It’s a very standard game concept. The world moves sideways, pans, and as a player you’re the submarine and you have to avoid hitting the walls and monster fish. The only thing that actually moves is the world. The fish move with the world. It all starts moving faster and faster the longer you play. Meanwhile, the grotto gets smaller and smaller. You cannot win this game, but that was never the point. It’s fun to play for a week or so and go on to the next game. The whole point is just writing the code to make it all happen.

There are other toys, like model planes and ships and cars and railroads. At one point, Dad buys expensive German model trains. The reasoning is that he never had a model train set as a kid, and 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 Linux show in San Jose, which prompted the editor to lure me into the assignment with the words, “We’ve got a global superstar right here in, uh, Santa Clara.” He faxed over some newspaper reports.

“
No, they’re all basically journalists,” he replied, adding: “So I know what
scum
you are.”

He didn’t think he could get away with that.

“
Oh. You come from scum?” I responded.

On the ride back over the mountain to Santa Clara, a black Jeep Cherokee pulled up alongside our car and its passenger yelled
“Hey Linus!”
and pulled out a throwaway camera to capture his apparent hero, who was sitting in the Mustang convertible’s backseat, grinning in the breeze.

V

And I basically sat in front of a computer for four years.

Okay, there was school: Norssen High, the most central of Helsinki’s five Swedish-language high schools, and the one nearest my home. Math and physics were interesting, and therefore easy. But whenever a subject involved rote memorization, my enthusiasm for that subject was diminished. So history was boring when it meant worrying about the date of the Battle of Hastings, but got interesting when you discussed the economic factors affecting a country. The same thing went for geography. I mean, who really
cares
how many people are in Bangladesh? Well, it might matter to a lot of folks, come to think of it. But the point is, it was far easier for me not to daydream about my computer when we were learning about something more engaging than statistics, like the monsoons, for example, or the reasons for the monsoons.