Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun

It was a big deal that the trade show organizers asked the benevolent dictator of Planet Linux to give a Comdex keynote speech. It was the computer industry's way of acknowledging that Linux was a force with which to be reckoned.

Bill Gates delivered the keynote on Sunday, the first night of the show. He had attracted a standing-room crowd in the Venetian Hotel ballroom, which is about the size of seven average IKEA stores. Conference-goers who were eager to hear what he had to say about the antitrust trial -- which was happening at the time -- or who just wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren they had seen the world's richest man in the flesh, lined up hours beforehand in a snake pattern in the Hotel conference center's massive basement level. Gates's speech began with a lawyer joke, then included well-choreographed demonstrations of Microsoft Web technology and highly polished video segments, one of them with Gates dressed like and imitating Austin Powers -- that sent the audience into fits of laughter.

I wasn't there. I was helping Tove shop for a bathing suit.

But the following night, I delivered my speech in the same room.

I would have rather gone shopping. Well, not really...

It's not that I wasn't prepared. Ordinarily I write my speech the day before, but this time I actually got a head start. It was a Monday night speech and on Saturday I had written it and set up the computer to project its slides. Everything looked really good. I had even put my speech on three different floppies, just to protect myself in case one of them might turn out bad. The one thing I hate more than speaking is speaking when something goes wrong. I even put my speech on the Internet, just in case all the floppies were bad.

There was a Corndex-inspired traffic jam on the Strip so we arrived at the Venetian Hotel only a half-hour before I was due to begin. I was with Tove and the girls and some folks from the show. When we finally got into the building, we had problems getting access to the backstage area because one of the organizers had misplaced the security badges. I mean, everything went wrong.

So finally we got inside. I would have been nervous if I were about to speak before forty people, let alone the biggest audience of my life. Then it happened.

I discovered that the computer itself, which had been so painstakingly set up two days earlier, was nowhere to be found. It was insane. Someone mentioned that people had started lining up for the speech downstairs more than four hours in advance, and that the waiting area was packed to capacity. Meanwhile, we were running around like hens without heads, searching backstage for the machine.

It was a normal desktop system with Star Office, one of the Linux office suites, installed. And I was supposed to just put in my floppy and go. Everything had been set up so that there wouldn't even be any cables to attach. But the computer had vanished . Apparently the machine had somehow gotten mislabeled or something, so it was shipped back. Happily, I had my laptop with me and I had the actual slide file of my speech on the laptop and I did have Star Office installed.

Because this was my laptop, I didn't have all the right fonts. That meant that the last line on all my slides was missing. When I realized this, I thought: Who cares? I'm going to get through this alive . Then we had to hook up all the cables. I mean, literally, they started letting people in before everything was set up. I was up there, still trying to get it to work, as a flood of humanity washed into the humongous auditorium, filling every available seat and then filling the standing area along the sides. Luckily, they gave me the standing ovation before I opened my mouth.

I started out with some lame reference to the lawyer joke that Bill Gates used to open his speech. I gave a one-sentence hint about what then-secretive Transmeta was developing. It had been wildly rumored in the press that I would use the Comdex speech as an occasion to (finally) announce Transmeta's chip. But we were just not ready. The main part of my speech simply involved ticking off the benefits of open source computing. I wasn't in a mood to crack as many jokes as I ordinarily do. At one point, Daniela -- who was sitting with Tove and Patricia in the first row -- began a crying spell that was probably audible throughout Las Vegas's casinos and strip clubs.

That was not a speech that will go down in history among the great orations. Later, someone tried to cheer me up by informing me that Bill Gates, too, had been visibly nervous on the same stage the night before. However, his onstage apparatus had worked without a hitch. The trouble was, he had the U.S. Department of Justice breathing down his neck. I guess I came out ahead.

It seemed like a strategy out of journalism 101: Find the person who had been waiting the longest to hear Linus's keynote, and hangout with him (undoubtedly, him) in line. What better way to gather insight into the dweebie hordes who follow Linus like he's some sort of vendorware-clad God.

At 5 P.M. I'm on an escalator descending into Geek Woodstock. At the head of the vast, snaking line is an intense computer science student from Walla Walla College who eagerly agrees to let me join him. He has been waiting, so far, two and a half hours to see Linus, and he will be waiting another two and a half hours before being let into the auditorium. His classmates, who are behind him in line, arrived in the queue maybe half an hour after he did. They drove down from Washington State with one of their professors and are sleeping in the gymnasium of a local high school. They all seem to have started their own Web design business. They seem to have conveniently divided up the universe of grownups into two groups -- hackers and suits -- and are constantly pointing out members of the latter category in the growing line, saying things like, "Man, look at all the suits here," the way their Delta Tau Chi counterparts might survey a beach during spring break and observe, "Man, look at all the foxes here." But like their Delta Tau Chi counterparts, they are doing all the usual horseplay -- slapping each other high-fives, trading insults, although the insults all relate to motherboards or gigabytes.

And then they talk about Linus. His name comes across capitalized, as in "LINUS wouldn't work at a company that wasn't going to be open source, He just wouldn't." They have been slavish scrutinizers of slashdot and other Web sites where rumors of Transmeta's hushed goings-on circulate like the lurid details of a Hollywood starlet's love life. This mania and the speculation/fascination isn't happening only among the ardent groupies who arrived here first.

I visit the men's room and take my place at the only empty urinal, interrupting a conversation in progress.

"This speech is going to be way boring compared to the Gates keynote," says the fellow to my left.

"What do you expect?" replies the other guy. "Linus is a hacker, not a suit. I mean, give him a break."

When we finally get into the auditorium, somehow we are not up front but toward the back of the middle. My line-mate from Walla Walla forgets, for a moment, about the excitement of seeing his hero live, and goes into a rage about not being in the first row, where he deserves to be. Soon, he is pointing out the suits in the audience. Even though we're maybe seventy-five yards from the front, it's possible to catch a glimpse of Linus on the darkened stage, seated at a computer. He quickly types into the computer while being surrounded by a few officials. What could be happening up there? Some sort of last-minute software demonstration?

Eventually, Linus and the others leave the stage. Somehow Linus International Executive Director Maddog (jon Hall) is introduced. My companion from Walla Walla gets visibly excited. "Check out the beard," he says. Then, Maddog announces how pleased he is to introduce a man who is like a son to him. Linus reemerges and gets a big hairy hug from Maddog. Even from back in the cheap seats, I could tell he was nervous.