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Comment by bohrbohra | Hacker News Reader

All I know about Transmeta is that Linus Torvalds moved over from Finland to the USA to work at this startup.

Other than that, it seems to have sunk without a trace.

I worked at Transmeta. I remember for the launch of one of the Crusoe-powered laptops, there was a bug that prevented the BIOS from booting Linux. Since the laptop was only going to run Windows ME, they didn’t fix it. Of course when Linus got a demo unit to play with, the first thing he did was try to install Linux on it. He let everyone know, and the bug was fixed soon there after.

Nice.

Glad you were a part of it at the time?

My job was essentially playing videos games for two years to stress test the chips. I was pretty good at Diablo 2 by the end of my run :) It was one of my better jobs!

Back in the day, Linux was less tolerant of incorrect behavior than Windows 9x was, and would crash, terminate a process, or otherwise surface errors at times when Windows 9x would just keep going until the bugs corrupted memory or similar. Having Linus aboard as a technical advisor, soneone to whom you can say "hey, the CPU is crashing here, what's the kernel trying to do at that spot?", alone, probably would have been well worth the money to hire him.

He was also one of the world leaders at the time of people who understood x86 privileged space like the back of their hand, and hadn't signed any AMD or Intel NDAs. Linux was originally designed not to be portable, but as a platform for playing with 386 privileged mode constructs. Portability came later (with Alpha IIRC).

Not before becoming the worst sort of patent trolls. "in January 2009, Transmeta sold itself to Novafora, who in turn sold the patent portfolio to Intellectual Ventures". (This was long after Linus had left.)

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