The chances of your hardware being recognized, activated, and working properly right after install was akin to getting a straight flush in poker.

Broadcom provided no code for its gear, so Finger helped reverse-engineer the necessary specs by manually dumping and reading hardware registers.

He summarizes his background: Fortran programmer in 1963, PDP-11 interfaces to scientific instruments in the 1970s, VAX-11/780 work in the early 1980s, and then Unix/Linux systems, until retiring from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in 1999.

The mineral Fingerite is named for Finger, whose work in crystallography took him on a fellowship to northern Bavaria, as noted in one Quora answer about the Autobahn.

He joined the computer club, which had a growing number of Windows PCs sharing a DSL connection through one of the systems running WinGate.

In a 2023 Quora response to someone asking if someone without “any formal training in computer science” can “contribute something substantial” to Linux, Finger writes, “I think that I have.”

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