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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

What I remember most about Transmeta was that they employed Linus Torvalds. This gave the name instant status and recognition among the Slashdot crowd and similar places.

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They had a lot of crazy smart employees. Aside from Linus, one of Quake's authors worked there. And I had a Google coworker (who, while at Google, wrote the C++ framework that all their C++ webservers are based on, and also was one of the early engineers on Dart) who was a Transmeta alum, and had previously worked on Hotspot before that.

It's one of those companies like General Magic and Symbolics that were complete failures in the marketplace, but are known for their alumni network. Even though the product didn't go anywhere, the tech that went into the product was incredibly impressive, and the engineers that built that tech are top-notch.

The first Crusoe Product was a Sony Picturebook. Somewhere in Japan there’s a prototype of that laptop with Linus’ and others signatures, including mine. It’d be fun to try and track that down someday.

Not in Japan, but I happen to possess a prototype Picturebook and now I'm curious... Where did you sign it? Inside the case like the original Macintosh? Or on the outside?

Gosh, it's been a long time. I don't remember for sure, but I have a faint recollection that I signed it in the O of SONY. But honestly, I don't remember.

the sony picturebook was my first personal laptop. a perfect travelcompanion. once i figured out how to install linux. and the transmeta cpu made it feel special even though as a user one doesn't really notice the difference.

That company was cool at the time. Their website was blank but If you looked at the HTML there was a comment saying “this page doesn’t exist” or something to that effect. I decided to see if sending an email to hr@transmeta.com would work and I got a reply and an interview and I was flown out to Sunnyvale. I thought I was the coolest person in the world at the time.

I also remember that something got messed up with my hotel reservation and I mentioned it during my interview and then I heard yelling.

And um... I was still just a college student. It was a different world for me.

That’s how I got the job!

I had one business meeting there, which included Linus and Steve Chamberlain, the creator of Cygwin. It looked like a fun place to work.

In his book Just for Fun Linus talks a bit about the company and why he chose to work there.

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