Source Code of the Modern World(s)

 Let's talk about a young man named Linus.

            No, not that one -- Linus Torvalds, a Finnish fellow who has affected your life in ways you may not even suspect. 

     Torvalds got his teenage kicks making Pac-Man clones and messing around with machine code. He was working on a masters degree in CompSci when he got seriously interested in operating systems. These days, we all deal with operating systems (usually Microsoft Windows and/or Apple's iOS) but in the early 90s the average person couldn't name one. Torvalds was not average. He wrote his own OS, released it to the world, and it came to be known as Linux. 

     Unline the familiar OSes, Linux is free and open-source, which means that anyone is free to read/use/change/improve it. Countless people have contributed to its development over the past three decades. Linux is so flexible and powerful that it runs three out of every four phones in the world and 90% of all cloud infrastructure. That's Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, the CIA, your bank...the modern world runs on Linux. 

     Linux is also literally out of this world. NASA uses it quite a lot. The Mars rover that landed on the red planet last week carried a small helicopter called Ingenuity, and Ingenuity runs on Linux.   

     I don't know what you did in college, but I didn't make anything that currently controls a flying machine on another freaking planet. Linus Torvalds is still working to improve Linux today. He believes that "open source is the only right way to do software." It would be difficult to argue with his track record. When sending software updates to Mars, NASA isn't taking chances with Windows and its Blue Screen of Death.   

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