Reading 10: Birth of a Nerd OS

 I think that some aspects, but not most, of Linus' upbringing are similar to mine. We both were nerds, however I managed to be thankfully nerdy in a time where being a nerd was starting to be seen as cool. I also would not self-describe as ugly, or a 'runt' like Linus does. I also did not grow up in Finland - as much as Salt Lake City did feel like a foreign country at times compared to other walks of life in America. One aspect of our lives that was weirdly and interestingly similar however was our first introduction to computing. I, too, was given access to a computer (mine was an old, bricky laptop that wouldn't function without a charger and ran Windows Vista) via my mother's father. I grew up a lot with my grandparents for a variety of reasons, and I used to love going over to their house because I could use the laptop. I vastly used it for playing browser-based flash games from places like Armorgames, Maxgames, and Candyland.com. One thing that I did latch on to was something that was shown to me at school during computer class - Scratch.mit.edu. It was my first 'programming' language, and I loved it. I remember my proudest work was that I found out I could use the camera and have things move like it was a stop-motion movie if I took enough pictures. My granddad would get mad because I wasn't the most computer-literate at the time and would download a virus or two from time to time. One eventually bricked the computer completely - sending it to, honestly, a well-lived death. It wasn't until many years later that I was able to get my hands on my own computer - which I also bricked trying to download Minecraft mods. I learned my lesson big that time, and haven't downloaded any viruses or trojans to this day, that I know about. 

I find Linus' story compared to others like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to be far more 'real'. Maybe its the fact that this is an autobiography, or that some of the other aspects of growing up are left out of Bill or Steve's stories, but I just feel like a lot of the biography stories for other tech giants just feel like modern day fairy tales. Especially the Steve Jobs documentary with Ashton Kutcher I watched in middle school - from what I remember it was very selective with only the good things about Steve Jobs' life and it just seemed more like a movie than a documentary, which I guess it was. It was weird that I thought that as early as middle school, but hey, at least I thought it was interesting. Linus' story is filled with many specifics, including a lot about Finland I never would have known and found interesting and grounding. It was nice to get a background and training wheels into a new culture I know nothing about from the perspective of someone who grew up there without rose-tinted glasses. All of his story from what I have read has just felt not only humble, but somewhat relatable. Which is interesting, as I said previously, since there were only a small few things that were actually relatable about our upbringing with computers. Nothing about Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg is remotely relatable, especially The Social Network. It feels like a modern-day Hercules, only in the sense that the real Hercules probably was just a normal guy who told great stories and didn't tell anyone that he soaked his feet in company toilets, denied his daughter's existence, or didn't listen to doctors at all which directly led to him dying an early death (Jobs).