Question: The History of Linux began with a personal project by what kind of engineer?

full_context: Document 1: ACM SIGOPS: ACM SIGOPS is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, an international community of students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners associated with research and development related to operating systems. The organization sponsors prestigious international conferences related to computer systems, operating systems, computer architectures, distributed computing, and virtual environments. In addition, the organization offers multiple awards recognizing outstanding participants in the field, including the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, in honor of Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of the renowned C programming language and Unix operating system.
Document 2: Hans Reiser: Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 19, 1963) is an American convicted murderer, computer programmer, and entrepreneur. He is the creator of the ReiserFS computer file system, which is contained within the Linux kernel, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4. In 2004, he founded Namesys, a corporation meant to coordinate the development of both file systems.
Document 3: COS (operating system): COS is a Linux kernel-based mobile operating system developed in China mainly targeting mobile devices, tablets and set top boxes. COS stand for China Operating system and is being developed by the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) together with Shanghai Liantong Network Communications Technology to compete with foreign operating systems like iOS and Android. The operating system is based on Linux but the platform is closed source. Security and the risk of back doors in devices from foreign vendors are some of the main motivations for COS. Android had almost 90% of the smart phone market when COS was introduced and Apple most of the remaining market share. COS looks very similar to Android and has its own Application Portal much like Android Market and iOS App Store.
Document 4: OpenAFS: OpenAFS is an open source implementation of the Andrew distributed file system (AFS). AFS was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and developed as a commercial product by the Transarc Corporation, which was subsequently acquired by IBM. At "LinuxWorld" on 15 August 2000, IBM announced their plans to release a version of their commercial AFS product under the IBM Public License. This became OpenAFS. Today, OpenAFS is actively developed for a wide range of operating system families including: AIX, Mac OS X, Darwin, HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Document 5: Justin Frankel: Justin Frankel (born 1978) is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER digital audio workstation, the NINJAM collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor. In 2002, he was named in the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Document 6: Linux Magazine: Linux Magazine is an international magazine for Linux software enthusiasts and professionals. It is published by the Linux New Media division of the German media company Medialinx AG.
Document 7: Pintos: Pintos is computer software, a simple instructional operating system framework for the 80x86 processor architecture. It supports kernel threads, loading and running user programs, and a file system, but it implements all of these in a very simple way. It was created at Stanford University by Ben Pfaff in 2004. It originated as a replacement for Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System (Nachos), a similar system originally developed at UC Berkeley by Thomas E. Anderson, and was designed along similar lines. Like Nachos, Pintos is intended to introduce undergraduates to concepts in operating system design and implementation by requiring them to implement significant portions of a real operating system, including thread and memory management and file system access. Pintos also teaches students valuable debugging skills.
Document 8: Sándor Kürti: Dr. Sándor Kürti (born 1947) graduated in 1971 from the University of Veszprem (Hungary) on the faculty of Chemistry Process Automation. In 1975 he obtained diploma in system manager engineering, and received doctor’s degree from mathematical statistical analysis. After his graduation he worked for the Danubian Oil Refinery. His fields were: implementation of computer control system at gasoline mixing unit, design of the process control system of a catalic crack plant. Later on he joined the International Research Institute MNIIPU (Moscow, SU) where he dealt with mathematical simulation of blending systems. Working for Honeywell, (Bracknell, UK) he simulated process control system of a catalytic crack plant. In 1989 he founded . KÜRT developed a hard disk repair technology, a world-renowned data recovery technology, as well as IT security technology and methodology. He was awarded Kalmar Laszlo Award for the data recovery technology in 1995, Information Technology Manager of the Year in 1997, 1998, Gabor Denes Award for Innovation in 1998. He is vice president of IVSZ (Hungarian Association of IT Companies). In 2004 he was decorated with the Széchenyi Prize for his exceptionally high standard, exemplary, internationally acknowledged accomplishments. He has been elected as a member of the Stakeholder Group of the European Union's data security organization (ENISA). In 2005 he was given Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur Of The Year 2004” international business award for his creativity, for his personal contribution to the accomplishment of innovative ideas, and his success in creating a model organizational culture at KÜRT Co. The KÜRT Co. received the ‘Family Friendly Workplace Prize 2005’ in the medium-sized enterprises category. In 2006 Dr. Sándor Kürti was the first representative of the Hungarian business community to participate in selecting the world’s best entrepreneur at The “World Entrepreneur Of The Year” contest organised by Ernst&Young. In 2007 he was given the Pro Information Technology Award by the Hungarian Association of IT Companies.
Document 9: MacOS version history: The history of macOS, Apple's current Mac operating system originally named Mac OS X until 2012 and then OS X until 2016, began with the company's project to replace its "classic" Mac OS. That system, up to and including its final release Mac OS 9, was a direct descendant of the operating system Apple had used in its Macintosh computers since their introduction in 1984. However, the current macOS is a Unix operating system built on technology that had been developed at NeXT from the 1980s until Apple purchased the company in early 1997.
Document 10: Linus Torvalds: Linus Benedict Torvalds ( ; ] ; born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator, and for a long time, principal developer of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systems such as the Linux operating system, Android, and Chrome OS. He also created the distributed revision control system Git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface. He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel". He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award.
Document 11: History of Linux: The history of Linux began in 1991 with the commencement of a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel.
Document 12: Ken Thompson: Kenneth Lane "Ken" Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.
Document 13: Dennis Ritchie: Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.
Document 14: Mark Shuttleworth: Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd., the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. In 2002, he became the first citizen of an independent African country to travel to space as a space tourist. He currently lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual citizenship from South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Document 15: LEAF Project: The LEAF - Linux Embedded Appliance Framework (Linux Embedded Appliance Framework) is a collection of Linux distributions that began as a fork from the Linux Router Project (LRP) "linux-on-a-floppy" distribution. Most users of these distributions are primarily interested in router and firewall functions, particularly as combined with the convenience of major features of general Linux distributions such as shells, packet filtering, SSH servers, DNS services, file servers, webmin and the like. LEAF is a common choice when commercial NAT routers are insufficiently flexible or secure, or are unattractively nonconformant to open source philosophy.
ground_truth: software engineer