This post is written to commemorate the life and work of Larry Finger (1940-05-22 – 2024-06-21), a person I have never met, and new nothing about before he died, exactly one year before the publication of this post.
Conventional information about Larry
Larry was born in Terril, Iowa to Wayne and Lucille Finger. In 1952, the family moved to Southern Minnesota. Larry graduated from Tracy High School in 1958. He attended the University of Minnesota. In 1962 he married Denise Lanning of Clara City, Minnesota. After that he completed his Bachelors Degree in Physics in 1964 and a PhD in Mineralogy in 1967.
He and his family then moved to a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC where they lived for 32 years. Larry researched mineral crystallography at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In the course of his career he had the mineral fingerite named after him. Much of his work involved programming, because science needs tools, and tools at this time largely meant software: Fortran programming from 1963; developing PDP-11 interfaces to scientific instruments in the 1970s; work with VAX-11/780 machines in the early 1980s, followed by work with Unix/Linux systems. In 1996 he received a Humboldt fellowship from the German Government and spent a year researching at the University of Bayreuth. He retired in 1999.
After retiring, Larry and Denise became full-time recreational vehicle enthusiasts spending their Winters in Mesa, AZ. In 2003 they purchased a retirement house in Smithville, MO where they continued to live. Here he was involved in refurbishing computers for the underprivileged.
Background information
At the beginning of the computer age there were corporations hoping to profit from their hardware investments. Like the automotive industry 80 years later, entrants to these new industries were not particularly skilled when it came to basic but necessary skills: machining in terms of automotives; software programming in terms of computers. They made some crude products that were used because elegant products were not available. By the early 1970s some talented amateurs had made some smaller, almost affordable, machines using home-brew software that almost worked. Then came the capitalists that bought other people’s labour at discounted prices, and sold them to make a fortune. Bill Gates owes his fortune to his mother, who had the right connections at IBM. Bill bought an a Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOSI, from Seattle Computer Products on 1981-07-27 for $5 000. This was relabeled as MS- and PC-DOS, which became an essential element of Microsoft, a business that brought him billions in net worth. He was the world’s wealthiest individual for 18 of the 23 year from 1995 to 2017.
Linux brought about a new opportunity for people to avoid the most blatant capitalists. The problem was that every computer hardware component manufacturer wanted to be paid a premium for anything that worked. So they prioritized systems for the relatively wealthy, and for the less wealthy, who allowed themselves to be coerced into using expensive computer systems. Thus, Microsoft and Apple soon dominated the emerging personal computer market, although there were other entrants such as Radio Shack and Comodore.
Computers generally have a number of microprocessors (µp) that perform different tasks. One important area involves communication, typically line connections, now with Ethernet or wireless connections with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. One of these is the Broadcom BCM43xx family of chips. Broadcom did not provide user accessible code for its equipment.
Unconventional information about Larry
As a full-time RV resident, dedicated to the avoidance of cold weather, Larry and his wife arrived at a 55-plus RV community in Mesa, Arizona, where he joined the computer club. This had a growing number of Windows PCs sharing a digital subscriber line/ originally loop (DSL), a family of technologies that transmits digital data over telephone lines. The DSL connection was managed by WinGate, a proprietary server and internet gateway, made by Qbik in New Zealand, and first released in October 1995. A new RV resort owner wanted to expand from 10 (the limit for a free system) to 22 workstations, but licenses for that many connections would have been too expensive for the club. Finger, who was highly distrustful of using Windows in a mission-critical role, set to work building a DIY Linux replacement.
With this goal accomplished, Larry found a new goal to get Wi-Fi to work on work stations, laptops and other devices running Linux. Once this was achieved, he would set new goals that involved its improvement. Finger reverse-engineered chips, by manually dumping and reading hardware registers to construct a workable driver. Finger worked with Broadcom drivers, then used the same approach when he worked on Realtek drivers. Some of this code is in use today.
Finger was not glamorous, but a patient, productive long-term contributor, a plodder. He had a GitHub profile showing more than 100 contributions to projects in 2024. Finger links to the stats for the Linux 6.4 version kernel, showing 172 346 lines of his code in it, roughly 0.5 percent of the total.
Outside of hundreds of kernel commits about drivers, Finger doesn’t have a large footprint on the web. He has a page for DRAWxtl, open-source software that produces crystal-structure drawings, on his personal domain, but not a personal homepage.
Larry took pride in never taken any courses in Computer Science. He had considerable experience in coding, much of from a time when computers were a lot less powerful than today, and it was critical to write code that ran efficiently.
Finger’s advice for would-be Linux contributors, is to start by focusing on small patches, deep reading of the guidelines, and always using git’s send-email to submit patches/ improvements. He notes that nothing will get shot down more quickly than a patch submitted from a mailer such as Thunderbird. Finding typos and errors in comments and text strings can help, too, especially in projects that involve contributors across countries. Finger advises being patient, expecting criticism about following rules and formats, and to keep plugging away at it.
In another Quora response about kernel driver development, Finger stated that kernel driver development can be highly rewarding, and also equally frustrating! He advises potential contributors to learn the C programming language, start with analyzing universal system bus (USB) drivers, and learn about direct memory access (DMA), a feature of computer systems that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU).
Finger’s best advice: Do not lose hope.
Note: When I consulted Larry’s obituary, it provided some basic information about him, but also advice about writing an obituary. In summary: 1) Deliver the news, announcing someone’s death. 2) Present the most meaningful events about that person’s life. 3) Use ObitWriter, a simple, free, fast app that asks some basic questions, then provides a complete draft of a well-written tribute, that can be sent directly to Legacy’s many partner newspapers. Yes, the entire website is an attempt to get people to spend more money needlessly by 4) publishing the obituary in multiple newspapers, 5) sending flowers, 6) lighting virtual candles, and 7) planting trees that: a) compensate for the ecological footprint of a human life., b) create oxygen, c) create habitat for wildlife, d) prevent [river] bank erosion, e) filter air pollution and f) inhibit climate change. At no time is there any mention of someone making a profit out of these activities, which is their main purpose.
When writing an obituary, suggestions #1 and #2 have merit, there is no need to follow #3 or beyond. An obituary should: a) announce the death; b) share that person’s life story; c) list family members; d) include funeral or memorial service information; e) add charity information; f) select a photo; g) share the obituary online and in your local newspaper. Personally, I am concerned about e and g. While I have my own charities I contribute to, those will end with my death. I don’t feel I should be telling others how to spend their money. I am also critical to the use of announcements/ obituaries in local newspapers. These are often corporations making money for shareholders.