Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn
Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn
Remembering Finger, 84, who learned as he went and left his mark on many.
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The chances of your hardware being recognized, activated, and working properly right after install was akin to getting a straight flush in poker.
Broadcom provided no code for its gear, so Finger helped reverse-engineer the necessary specs by manually dumping and reading hardware registers.
He summarizes his background: Fortran programmer in 1963, PDP-11 interfaces to scientific instruments in the 1970s, VAX-11/780 work in the early 1980s, and then Unix/Linux systems, until retiring from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in 1999.
The mineral Fingerite is named for Finger, whose work in crystallography took him on a fellowship to northern Bavaria, as noted in one Quora answer about the Autobahn.
He joined the computer club, which had a growing number of Windows PCs sharing a DSL connection through one of the systems running WinGate.
In a 2023 Quora response to someone asking if someone without "any formal training in computer science" can "contribute something substantial" to Linux, Finger writes, "I think that I have."
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