Alan Cox (computer programmer)

Prior to his Linux work, Cox developed some video games for home computers, such as the text adventure Blizzard Pass.

Involvement in the Linux kernel

While employed on the campus of Swansea University, Cox installed a very early version of Linux on one of the machines belonging to the university computer society. This was one of the first Linux installations on a busy network and revealed many bugs in the networking code. Cox fixed many of these bugs and went on to rewrite much of the networking subsystem. He then became one of the main developers and maintainers of the whole kernel.

He maintained the 2.2 branch, and his own versions of the 2.4 branch (signified by an "ac" in the version, for example 2.4.13-ac1). This branch was very stable and contained bugfixes that went directly into the vendor kernels.

Cox was once commonly regarded as being the "second in command" after Linus Torvalds himself, before reducing his involvement with Linux to study for an MBA.

On 28 July 2009, Cox quit his role as the TTY layer maintainer, after disagreement with Torvalds about the scope of work required to fix an error in that subsystem.

Alan was employed by the Linux distributor Red Hat during 1999–2009. Starting from 2011 he was employed by Intel Corporation, but he left both Intel and Linux kernel development in January 2013 to care full-time for his wife during a critical period of medical treatment, and returned to both later that year, until taking early retirement at the end of 2019.

He has also been involved in the GNOME and X.Org projects, and was the main developer of AberMUD, which he wrote whilst a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

On 31 Oct 2014, Alan Cox announced Fuzix OS, a tiny system V kernel, initially for Z80, on Google+.