This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

After retirement, Finger writes in Linux Journal, “I became a full-time RV resident, dedicated to the avoidance of cold weather.”

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

A new RV resort owner wanted to expand to 22 workstations, but WinGate licenses for that many connections would have been too expensive for the club.

Finger, who was “highly distrustful of using Windows 98 in a mission-critical role,” set to work building a DIY Linux replacement.

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