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Triumph of the nerds, Part I

Last Friday during my programming language course we watched a film named Triumph of the Nerds. The film is about how a bunch of nerds changed the way we live, the way we work, even the way we think. The documentary is about personalities like Steve Wozniak, who was the mastermind behind the first operative system. Other personalities like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer come into the equation, drawing a neat picture of how the world of computers was built.

It was amazing to see the main characters of the computer era in this documentary, but I think they forgot about someone who absolutely changed todays live: Linus Trovalds.


Linus Trovalds is the person behind Linux. For giving you a perspective on how important is the development and the community around Linux, check this out:

1.- Linux is the first operating system that is completely open source, this means that every single breakthrough or improvement someone makes on it, it has to be posted online. And as you might have already guessed, it means that you can change it's capabilities to better meet your particular needs.

2.- Linux has achieved critical mass. It's impact on very big hardware vendors like IBM, Oracle and HP has made the community grow exponentially. Nowadays practically every mobile, every server on Earth runs Linux distros!

I mean... Linux and Trovalds really where missing in this equation. Did you know that Linux wasn't originally meant to be open source? It really all started out by Linus trying to impress his sister. Kind of like a statement: check out my programming abilities! I'm not trying to plagiarize any content by TedX talks which I think they are amazing, so go ahead and check out this amazing interview: Linus Trovalds: The mind behind Linux to learn why Linus is also a huge nerd and how he changed the way we live!

I you are still interested in seeing information about Linux and it's impact, check out this post by Wired Magazine: Linux took over the web, now it's taking over the world!




Thank you, and support open-source communities!


- Diego





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