OS programming from absolute scratch is nothing special by the standards of what was done that day (some years later you had OS toolkits and a huge amount of tools to make that far easier, like virtualization; 20 years we could maybe beep to debug our programs). Many in the programme grew up on Commodore or Spectrum which also meant a lot of low level tricks.

So Linux 0.1 didn't really have any amazing contributions to computer science (on the contrary, you may recall the famous Tanenbaum-Torvalds thread on microkernels vs monolithic kernels). It was pragmatic and, quite quickly, useful.

I think where Linus did extremely well was a) successfully managing a huge number of contributions while being highly technically involved and b) relentlessly changing the internal design to improve it. If Linux had been a commercial product, there'd be lot of senior people greatly invested in their own designs that'd be unwilling to modify them.

For comparison, here's another famous kernel programmer who has the technical skills, but not the collaboration skills: http://www.templeos.org/

That's a key point. Linus is not a Computer Scientist, he is a programmer. CSs advance the theory of computation. Progs make shit we can use.

I'm a fairly anti-social person. I don't know many people. Yet at the time Linux came out, I personally knew a dozen people who could easily have written it when they were young.

So why didn't they?

Several of them had satisfied their urge to hack on operating systems by getting jobs hacking and porting Unix (and a couple of them "ported" Unix by essentially writing a new implementation).

The others who could have done it had no need for it. They all had easy access to Unix workstations and Unix VAXes, and were busy dealing with their urges to hack on other things like graphics or AI or networks or scientific computing.

The amazing thing about Linus is not his considerable technical ability--plenty of people have that--but rather his management ability. As I said earlier, I know at least a dozen people who could have written a kernel...but I don't think any of us could have taken it from a one man kernel to a worldwide project with hundreds of contributors.

In a hundred years, Linus Torvalds will have a footnote in technical textbooks, and a whole chapter in business textbooks.

Here's the thread context, for anyone else who is curious how Linus responded: http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0240.html

For the record, he didn't seem to address esr's email.