[mindcrash]

"Torvalds built Linux in grad school. He used C. He had to build everything himself. The code quality is one of the finest. He was an engineer more than anything"

This is incorrect though. Linux, as in the Linux kernel, started out as a small hobby project hacking on Minix using the GNU tools from RMS and friends. Minix, at the time, was a small UNIX derivative famously created by professor Andrew Tanenbaum to teach how to build Operating Systems to students (and not-so-much-students who happened to be interested in the same subject).

See: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html

What all the mentioned people (and most nerds from the same period) share, by the way, is more or less the hacker mindset which was famously described in Phrack #7: http://www.phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article