Linus Torvalds received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

Linus Torvalds, the creator and primary developer of the kernel Linux, удостоен Computer Pioneer Award for 2014 from the organization IEEE Computer Society.

Computer Pioneer Award is awarded since 1981 to "express recognition and respect for the vision of those people whose efforts led to the creation and continued prosperity of the computer industry." Under the terms of these efforts should be made not less than 15 years ago. Merit holder engraved on personal bronze medal.

Первую medal in 1981 was Jeffrey Chuan Chu for early work in the field of design logic integrated circuits. In subsequent years, became laureates John Kemeny for BASIC (1985), Niklaus Wirth for Pascal (1987), Douglas Engelbart for interfaces interact with the computer a > (1992), Dennis Ritchie for Unix (1994), Alexei Lyapunov and Sergei Lebedev for computers, cybernetics and programming in the USSR (1996), Gennady Stolyarov for creating software to computers series "Minsk" (2000), and many others outstanding researchers.



A resident of the Finnish city of Helsinki began work on the Linux kernel in 1991. Fascinated by programming up to this young man has developed several games. Linus wrote his own OS on Intel 386, a UNIX-like operating system Minix, which was created by Andrew Tanenbaum as a tool for learning. Once assembled a group of like-minded Torvalds for Linux kernel development, the first version was released in the spring of 1994. Just recently we celebrated the 20th anniversary of this remarkable event.

Torvalds in 1996 took a job at a California startup Transmeta, which developed energy efficient CPU. He moved to the United States and continued to coordinate the work on the kernel Linux. In 2003, Torvalds retired from Transmeta and concentrate fully on the project Open Source. This was made possible thanks to a scholarship (salary) from the newly formed social organization The Linux Foundation (at the time it was called the Open Source Development Labs).

Over the years, Linus Torvalds has received numerous awards, including the Millennium Technology Prize from the Academy of Technology in Finland (2012), C & C Prize from the company NEC (2010), Takreda Award (2008), Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society (2000), Pioneer Award from the Foundation Electronic Frontier (1998).

Linus himself wanted to call the new operating system Freax, from the words "free" and "freak", with the addition of X to indicate Unix. But his friend administered a FTP-server, where the new OS for the first time is available for download, and it created a folder for Torvalds "linux & quot ;.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/221801/