Comment by bitwize
8 hours ago
Back in the day, Linux was less tolerant of incorrect behavior than Windows 9x was, and would crash, terminate a process, or otherwise surface errors at times when Windows 9x would just keep going until the bugs corrupted memory or similar. Having Linus aboard as a technical advisor, soneone to whom you can say "hey, the CPU is crashing here, what's the kernel trying to do at that spot?", alone, probably would have been well worth the money to hire him.
He was also one of the world leaders at the time of people who understood x86 privileged space like the back of their hand, and hadn't signed any AMD or Intel NDAs. Linux was originally designed not to be portable, but as a platform for playing with 386 privileged mode constructs. Portability came later (with Alpha IIRC).