Some friends told me they ran into Andrew Tannenbaum at Embedded World a few years ago and asked him if he still believed that Minix was better than Linux. Apparently he said yes.
DISCLAIMER: 2nd hand story.
The early days of Linux
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Re: The early days of Linux
#22> The system was initially called Freax Maybe it's common knowledge, but first time I've heard that. I wonder how that would have impacted adoption if it had stuck?
Hard to say. "Unix" is pronounced like "eunuchs" and yet saw pretty wide adoption.
Definitely in a different time and under other circumstances than Linux though.
Re: The early days of Linux
#23I absolutely love articles like this that humanize the creation of such a megalithic thing. It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends. I love it. I think it would be hard to overstate the impact of Linux and free software. I do climate science research and its pretty obvious that every single paper that contains an important finding was built on FOS…
> It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends. The modern world is underpinned by such discoveries--very accidental or curious types that go on to change the world and impact a lot of people. To quote a Steve Job's line: "I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being" [0] [0]: https://putsom…
Absolutely. But also, as a species, we're such a fan of these narratives that lionize people like Steve jobs. A brief article written by a friend about a project from their college years is much more humanizing than anything I've read about Steve Jobs. Sure, there's the "garage beginnings" part of the story but even that is very much lionized as "grind and hustle".
I think the way the myth of Steve Jobs and his impact on the world is a great example to juxtapose against Linus\Linux in so many ways. Linux runs nearly everything and was given away for free and the broader public is totally unaware. Steve Jobs sells hardware and constantly played up the lion narrative as a push to make money and be important. Im more interested in the former than the lot.
Inflammatory comment? Maybe. But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.
Re: The early days of Linux
#24Now _this_ is the kind of content that I crave for.
Re: The early days of Linux
#25> During this time, late spring of 1991, I wrote an implementation of the C sprintf() function for [Linus Torvalds], as he hadn't yet learned how to write functions with variable argument lists. I wanted to spare him the pain of having a different function for every type of value to write out.
That’s such a cool detail. Everyone starts somewhere.
(Shuffling off to commit change to Git and deploy to Linux…)
Re: The early days of Linux
#26This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system.
What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it.
By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.
Re: The early days of Linux
#27Aaah, yeah, the "good old days". I got started with Linux around 1995 or so. I don't actually remember which distribution I used first, as I was experimenting a lot back then. I remember using Turbo Linux, Yggdrasil, and Slackware at times. Sometime in 95 or 96 I was a student at UNC Wilmington and I remember a bunch of us were out in the courtyard by the C.S. building when somebody came up talking about this new company called "Red Hat" that was, get this, selling Linux! That led to some rather, erm, passionate, discussion that day.
I actually wound up gravitating to Red Hat linux myself in the end, and to this day I still use RH oriented distros (mostly Fedora) for most things. And I even wound up working for Red Hat for a spell.
So yeah, Linux and his "toy" kernel definitely had a huge impact on my life over the years. And so did Bob Young and his company that had the audacity to charge money for free software. :-)
Re: The early days of Linux
#28> "Linux is running on every continent, on every ocean, on billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars."
What a fantastically cool sentence!
Re: The early days of Linux
#29This article is a masterpiece of deadpan Nordic understatement! Also a good read...
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Re: The early days of Linux
#30I can't find the article anymore (and I've looked for it several times in the past) but someone was making the point that open source was essentially an economic phenomenon. Insofar as distribution costs went to zero with the advent of mass-access to the internet then it was inevitable that people would start sharing software. Obviously this takes nothing away from all those early contributors, but it is food for thought.
Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage.