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Happy 20th birthday, Linux

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Re: Happy 20th birthday, Linux

#31

Post by eru »

cpeterso wrote: post #21

Is Linux a repeatable phenomenon? Is there a college student today whose hobby OS can snowball into such a dominant technology? If Linux started in 2011, I wonder what design decisions would have Linus made differently. The Innovator's Dilemma suggests that a disruptive technology replace a dominant standard by working bottom-up: specialize in a corner of the market that is too small or unprofitable to be of interest…

I guess Linux will be hard to repeat, exactly because it is so successful. There's simply no similar itch left to scratch for hobbyists. There are still people writing general operating system kernels from scratch, but they are not driven by the lack of a decent free general operating system.

Linux lacks in real-time features. That could be an angle to get in a new operating systems.

There's a saying that Unix stopped serious research into operating systems. Whenever somebody writes a new system nowadays, one of the first things they port is the Unix infrastructure.

Re: Happy 20th birthday, Linux

#32

Post by eru »

saw-lau wrote: post #2

I thought this quote was interesting: 'helped keep Linux together and defy the trend for forking and fractionalization' when compared with images like this regarding the numerous distributions: http://files.cyberciti.biz/uploads/tips/2007/06/44218-linuxd... DISCLAIMER: I've never used Linux, partly because of the above ('which one should I pick?'). Also, I'm not trolling here, but would welcome the opportunity to und…

In contrast the `fork-happy' BSDs use different kernels, but their userland is closer to each other than the Linux distributions are.

Re: Happy 20th birthday, Linux

#33

Post by pointyhat »

microtonal wrote: post #19
pointyhat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did have the Internet and dial ups back then you know... ...back when usenet and gopher were king and you could telnet places still... ...and spam was about new Sun Sparc equipment. Wish I could get back my SS2 with Wietek CPU and 2x 200Mb disks running SunOS4 :)

Most people in the Netherlands didn't, where the then telco state monopoly charged 25 guilder cents per minute for calls.

Ouch that is really expensive. Was approx 1/8 of that in the UK at the same time with our state monopoly (BT)

Re: Happy 20th birthday, Linux

#37

Post by ethank »

trafficlight wrote: post #13
microtonal wrote: post #9

It has been a fun ride! I started using Linux in 1994 when I was twelve with Slackware Linux. I remember having long fights with my younger brother about how to divide a 40MB hard disk between Linux and MS-DOS (for games). It is important to remember how Linux and the BSDs made it possible for a whole generation of tech enthusiasts to educate themselves. At that age, I could not afford to buy a compiler or books as m…

At 12 years old, how did you end up finding out about it so early?

At 13 I was interning at our local newspaper and they were running 0.91 beta kernel of Linux on the machine that extracted data from a PDP-11 (via serial) and parsed it for saving to the Mac's for QuarkXPress. My first Unix experience was debugging parts of that system for a new version of Quark.

Sniff. I'm old.

Re: Happy 20th birthday, Linux

#38

Post by klutometis »

Looking back at Linus' original email, I find it interesting that there's a "Summary" header in addition to "Subject:"

  > Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
  > Summary: small poll for my new operating system
RFC 5322 [1] doesn't have anything to say about a summary header, so maybe it was an invention of Linus'.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.6

Re: Happy 20th birthday, Linux

#39

Post by linuxhansl »

Heh. I remember using the Linux Kernel 0.99pl13.

I was working at DEC then and I remember writing a batch job that would download the the SLS (and later Slackware) distribution floppy images and store them on one of our VAX machines, so that I could copy them onto floppies the next day in order to take them home.

Ah fun times.

Re: Happy 20th birthday, Linux

#40

Post by abhiyerra »

ktf wrote: post #24
microtonal wrote: post #9

It has been a fun ride! I started using Linux in 1994 when I was twelve with Slackware Linux. I remember having long fights with my younger brother about how to divide a 40MB hard disk between Linux and MS-DOS (for games). It is important to remember how Linux and the BSDs made it possible for a whole generation of tech enthusiasts to educate themselves. At that age, I could not afford to buy a compiler or books as m…

I still remember the first time I commandeered our one and only phone line for an entire weekend to download the Slackware ISO. Version 7, if I remember correctly? My parents were pissed. I was so excited to have a "real" C/C++ development environment for free, after years of using a pirated version of Visual Studio. I installed Slack, and within 45 minutes I had totally hosed the system and had to re-install. Then I…

I did the same thing with Slackware 7. I remember downloading Linux 2.4 the day it came out on my Windows machine which took over 8 hours on NetZero dial up. I then compiled it on my Linux machine which took over a day. It was still running when I went to (middle) school and returned. I completely hosed my machine but I've learned a bit since then. :)
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