71–80 of 96 posts
Had Microsoft been half serious with NT POSIX subsystem as they are with WSL, and it would never taken off, as proven by the masses that rather pay for Apple or Windows devices instead of supporting GNU/Linux OEMs.
> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) Nice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
Without them it would just be like Hurd.
A year or so later, with high bandwidth connections in the UK still a bit thin on the ground, I downloaded the full 100 disk SLS distribution at work (a satisfying brick of disks).
The process was amusingly convoluted: using ICL's X25 email client I would email requests to a mail responder on one of the archives (funet I think?) for 64k uuencoded chunks of each disk. Then I saved the email, trimmed the header/footer garbage, stitched it into one file, decoded it to a binary, copoed it to a floppy, and repeated. It took about a week.
So just so you kids know, before you get off my lawn, I [1] jcday are you out there? I owe you one! :)
In retrospect, I often still wonder what would have happened if BSD weren't mired in legal issues at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I remember correctly, QNX 4 demo was the first graphical OS that I've seen booting and running from a floppy . That was somewhere in late 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 https://web.archive.org/web/19991128112050/http://www.qnx.co...
As impressive as it was at the time (and still is), a floppy is writable. Booting from read only media and having a fully functioning OS was completely groundbreaking. Especially when you consider how much hardware was supported without configuration.
In retrospect, I often still wonder what would have happened if BSD weren't mired in legal issues at the time.
I doubt things would have been much different. It wasn't "mired" in legal issues, there was one lawsuit was brought against one company selling the code (not developers or users or hobbyists) in 1992, in '93 their injunction was denied and the case collapsed from there with a counter suit launched. It was all settled in 94. The myth is that BSD development ceased or scaled right back, but that really wasn't the case.…
If the initial toy version of Linux would have competed since the beginning with BSD, it might have been abandoned without further development.
I have started to use both Linux and FreeBSD simultaneously, in 1995, after receiving some Slackware CD's with a computer magazine and after buying the FreeBSD 2.0 CD's.
I have continued to use both of them until today, even if before 2003 ... 2005 I had been using FreeBSD much more than Linux and since 2003 ... 2005 I have been using Linux much more than FreeBSD.
Even early Linux was nice, as long as you did not attempt to fight with X Windows to get a GUI and you were content with the CLI.
However early FreeBSD distributions were in a completely different class of quality than early Linux distributions.
The documentation of early FreeBSD was superb and it included absolutely everything that you would ever want to know. The excellent FreeBSD packet manager did not have equivalents in any Linux distribution, much less in Windows or Mac OS, and it provided useful applications covering most of the needs existing at that time.
At least for the tasks that were important for me at that time, e.g. networking, the speed of FreeBSD was much greater than of both Linux and Windows NT.
Early FreeBSD was also much more reliable than both Linux and Windows NT. For example, at that time I could not yet afford to have UPSes for all computers, even if I was located in a place with frequent power failures.
The FreeBSD UFS with soft updates has always survived without problems after any power failures, while both the computers with Windows NTFS and those with Linux having early versions of the Linux file systems with journaling, have frequently become unbootable after power failures, despite the journals.
So the increasing popularity of Linux was not caused by it being a better OS.
I would guess that the popularity of early Linux was due to its distribution model.
To experience BSD in a time when it was not yet feasible to make large downloads over the Internet, you had to buy the CD sets for either FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD.
The CD sets were quite cheap in comparison to a non-pirated Windows copy, but they still required you to make a committed decision about that.
On the other hand, to experience Linux, I did not have to do anything. At least in Europe, where I lived, a large number of computer magazines, which were still popular as an important source of information at that time, before everything moved on the Internet, came very frequently bundled with Linux installation CD's, so in a short time I got maybe a dozen of Linux CD's, without explicitly searching for them. If I had them, why not use them?
While in the beginning FreeBSD was without doubt better than Linux, that changed in time due to the far larger number of Linux developers.
The main problem of Linux and FreeBSD, then as also today, is that all peripheral device manufactures write Windows drivers for them but they do not publish their documentation and few provide drivers for Linux or FreeBSD.
So in the following years after the initial introduction, more people have written reverse-engineered device drivers for Linux than for FreeBSD, so for any random computer it became much more likely that its hardware was supported by Linux than by FreeBSD.
For example in 2001 I bought some motherboards with a VIA chipset for Athlon CPUs. I could not use FreeBSD on them, as I desired, because there were weird data corruption events, either on hard-disks or on recordable CDs.
I had to use Linux, which worked fine. Later I discovered that the VIA Athlon chipset had a horrible bug in the ATA controller, which caused the data corruption, and VIA kept the bug secret. The Windows drivers included a workaround that serialized the write commands to the ATA controller, avoiding the corruption. Some Linux developer reverse engineered the VIA driver and added the workaround to the Linux kernel, while the FreeBSD kernel did not handle this quirk.
There were many such examples that contributed to Linux becoming more and more popular.
The turning point when Linux leapfrogged FreeBSD and began to have an increasing advance over it was around 2003, when Intel introduced Pentium 4 with SMT (a.k.a. Hyperthreading) and 2005, when AMD introduced multicore CPUs.
In the beginning the BSD systems could not use more than 1 thread at all, so they were not able to use efficiently the new processors. The BSD systems needed many years to become MT capable.
On the other hand, Linux had very quickly versions able to use multiple threads and then the kernel was improved at a very quick pace to become more and more scalable.
I cant find the history of Loadlin. When did it came out? It seemed to be the gateway from MSDOS to Linux Shell. If you had no experience with Windowing systems, or just shitty machine, you slowly turned into Linuxer without paying much attention to details.
I still remember that day when a South African colleague, who was a known Linux fan-boy, was enthusing about Linux (and also belittling Windows in the process as is customary) attempting to get us to try the OS. He even used to use Emacs for Java programming. I had asked him then: "What about software such as Adobe Photoshop? How do I use that in Linux?" He had said "We have GIMP! And it is free too..." I had thought…
Is that even possible these days for a current version? Or does it need constant license validation?