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Linus Torvalds is the Finish American software engineer and the top mind behind the Linux kernel. He attended the University of Helsinki between 1988 and 1996, graduating with his masters degree in computer science from NODES research group. During his first year of college, he joined the Finnish Army and selected an 11 month long officer training program. Torvalds did this to fulfill a mandatory military service requirement of Finland.He was a 2nd lieutenant in the Finnish Army and his role was a ballistic calculation officer. He was exposed to Unix for the first time in 1990 when he returned from the army. Linus has been programming for a while, so if the question is how long has he been programming, the answer would be since 1990 when he took his first c programming language class. If the question is how long has he been working for a company as a programmer, the answer would be since 1997 when he moved to California to work for the Transmeta Corporation.
Linux is a "Unix-like and POSIX-compliant computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution."(Wikipedia). the Linux kernel was released on October 5th, 1991. Programmers who use languages such as Ada, c, c++, java, FORTRAN and mot other programming languages.

Compared to Windows and Mac, Linux is free and can be distributed downloaded almost anywhere. There are paid versions but they are considerably cheaper than Windows or Mac. Another difference between the three is that Linux has the ability to be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, video games, consoles, supercomputers and mainframes.

There are many advantages to having Linux. The Linux operating system is very stable and rarely crashes. If it does indeed crash, the whole system doesn't go down with it. It is easier to install than Windows. Another benefit of Linux systems is that they are much less vulnerable to viruses. Most viruses are intended for Windows so the chance of getting a virus with Linux is greatly reduced. There are viruses out there but not nearly as many.

 With advantages, there are always disadvantages. A disadvantage of Linux is that some programs that work on Windows, do not work on the Linux operating system. Another disadvantage is that there are a limited number of peripheral hardware drivers for Linux.

 http://www.diffen.com/difference/Linux_vs_Windows

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
 
http://www.linfo.org/linus.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds