The irony is that the only reason Linus Torvalds spent so much time on Linux in the early days is because he accidentally made his dialer program use his minix partition to dial up his university. The dialer was fine with it... it even 'talked' back, destroying the data. He couldn't re-install Minix because he didn't have a copy of it. So he was stuck with Linux, and he was forced to improve it if he wanted to use his expensive computer.