Letter from Another Linus, the Gadget King

“I was at the door all day waiting for the UPS-delivery from Amazon.com and I never sent you any letter about this guy from India,” says another Linus in a letter.

This might end up as the most confusing series in the history of letter exchanges:

The adventure started some days ago. An engineer from India, now working in London, told his tale about his upbringings; a story about his father, the carpenter, his mother, the mother, and all the paper that made him the computer wizard he is today.

In one small part of this story he mentioned that he sent one of these paper slips to Linus Torvalds who then merged it into the Linux kernel. This was long before Linux in Git, back then it was all tarballs and manual patching, and patches in paper were good as … paper.

I then got a letter about this topic from a person calling himself Linus, a David Lynch-styled rebuttal of the whole thing: Linux and paper patches had never happened, vodka were served by the Elders. Crazy stuff.

You can read all about this in the links below. And if you still follow me you will be delighted to hear that I had another letter in my mailbox this morning. From Linus. But not the same Linus.

It was from another Linus, a Linus very occupied with deliveries of gadgets from Amazon.com:

Hi there, C.

Got to be short. Got a new keyboard – having trouble tyeping. Waiting for another gadget from Amazon.com, not sure what it is, but the UPS tracking site says it’s right around the corner.

In fact, the UPS-site claims they tried to deliver this yesterday, “But the business was closed”. That’s not true, I was standing here in my bathrobe the whole day, waiting.

Yes, I love my bathrobe, but that is the only remotely true part of that insane letter you posted yesterday. I know nothing about that crazy stuff.

Gotta go, UPS at the door. Chiperidoo …

Linus