In an effort to meet more student members of the Duck Pond, Wirzenius and Linus joined one of the many societies that form an important element of Helsinki University's student scene. Only the eyebrows, which are remarkably dark and bushy, jar slightly with the otherwise boyish face. Wirzenius recalls that the first time he met Linus, "it was one of the introductory lectures for new students.," Wirzenius didn't notice much of his friend that day except that "the end of his big nose tends to twitch up and down when he speaks, and it is fun to look at." Aside from the nose, which, in truth, is not that big, little in Linus's appearance is out of the ordinary: He is of medium height, with brown hair his blue eyes gaze steadily from behind his glasses. His fellow student in computer science, Lars Wirzenius, comments that "at that time there weren't many Swedish-speaking computer science students, and those that were, were at least a couple of years older than we were." It was therefore only natural that a pair of Swedish speakers isolated among the Finnish majority of the new intake for computer studies should gravitate towards each other. First, in the fall of 1988, he entered Helsinki University to study computer science, which by now already looked likely to turn from a passion into a profession.Īt university, Linus found the same tendency for the two language communities in Finland to keep to themselves. But this was still some years off from the time when Linus was hacking on his Sinclair QL. This area of computing - multitasking - led him to start coding the simple program that would eventually turn into Linux. The main thing he wanted, he explained, was "a machine at home that does multitasking." Even though the Sinclair QL was in many ways a toy, it had one very powerful feature, thanks to its choice of chip: it could run several programs simultaneously, just like commercial minicomputers. Linus had been content to put up with Sinclaire's QL - although it had some fairly obvious shortcomings - for a simple reason. This was a typically quirky product from the British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair. In the end, Linus chose an unusual micro for his next machine, the Sinclair QL ("Quantum Leap"). When you had to be kind of crazy and tweak cycles." "Tweaking cycles" - getting every last drop of performance out of code - would later mean that Linux was far faster and leaner than comparable programs. The other is more pragmatic: "I had been a performance junkie since forever. One was his emerging love of programming at the most fundamental level. There are probably two reasons for his early interest in this aspect. Wttr.As Linus himself says, he has always been a "low-level" person. Ninvaders, ASCII text version of Space Invaders See the rainbowstream usage manual to get started Rainbowstream - command line character based Twitter client Mpcplus, featureful ncurses based Music Player clientĪsciimatics - automatically display a variety of character based animation effectsĪsciinema - automatically create ascii character based video clips Gdu, character based disk usage analyzer
Newsboat, character based RSS feed reader W3m, another character based web browser Jrnl, a simple command line journal application Many of these are worth checking out and using by themselves (even if you decide to not use them as part of the Asciiville project ). Asciiville integration is provided for a whole bunch of different command line tools.