Around 20 years ago when I was taking my computer education, low-level programming was all there was.
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/
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/