Very Finnish humour:
"I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work."
Kippis, folks!
The early days of Linux
111–120 of 302 posts
Re: The early days of Linux
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
";-)" It looks so strange with the nose nowadays. But that was how people did it if I remember correctly.
I always used the nose even when my friends used noseless emoticons as the latter look like squished faces to me :-P
Huh! I always read that as sticking out one's tongue.
Re: The early days of Linux
#113I'm pretty sure Linus used Doom to stress-test the memory-management, not Quake. I have had a quote in my stash for ages: I've run DOOM more in the last few days than I have the last few months. I just love debugging ;-) -- Linus Torvalds
";-)" It looks so strange with the nose nowadays. But that was how people did it if I remember correctly.
I still like to do these: :^) — with a nose that looks like, well, a nose, *Emojis bring some expression, but they take some away, too.
Re: The early days of Linux
#114I 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…
This & open source give me hope in humankind. Almost drop a tear reading the article.
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Re: The early days of Linux
#115> 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?
There is a quote somewhere that says Linus names his programs after himself. Freax for freak, and then later git too. Git means an unpleasant person.
Re: The early days of Linux
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 impac…
> But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic. Thank you for expressing that, I agree wholeheartedly. There's this increasing sentiment that everything is a product - something many people on HN are responsible for promoting. Where once was humility, there's now opportunism: Terminal emulator? Meet subscription service. In an industry defined by it's ability to…
Same with Woz, the actual brains behind Apple. Jobs was just a charismatic designer and salesman.
Re: The early days of Linux
#117I wonder how much the overconfidence played in making it a success.
Re: The early days of Linux
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs was one of the greatest marketers in recent history, and from that perspective he really was "totally dependent on them for [his] life and well-being". Others did the work going from zero to one, he did the work of going from one to a hundred.
The first ones put in an infinity units of effort and received maybe N units of recognition for it. Jobs put in 100 units of effort and received N billion units of recognition for it.
While I do agree with you on the effort assessment, or certainly the "trailblazing" factor... (to me, writing a kernel and operating system that could be used by the entire world before there existed a notion of what that kernel and operating system might look do that is infinitely more impressive than being a salesman)
.. I do think it's a red herring. To me it's not so much about effort than it is impact. If every person to ever write code was trying to sell a product, progress would have halted as it started. It's both the effort, the philosophy, and the philanthropy of it. Which is also what has made it thankless-ish.
Re: The early days of Linux
#119I 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…
>> One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector starting with "ATDT" and the university modem-pool phone number. After recovering from this, he implemented file permissions in his kernel. Now this nugget made my day. I love Finnish deadpan humor.
dropped by to comment the exact same thing. good ole' /dev/*. make sure you're sending bytes to the correct one!
Re: The early days of Linux
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs was one of the greatest marketers in recent history, and from that perspective he really was "totally dependent on them for [his] life and well-being". Others did the work going from zero to one, he did the work of going from one to a hundred.
The first ones put in an infinity units of effort and received maybe N units of recognition for it. Jobs put in 100 units of effort and received N billion units of recognition for it.
Popular recognition is usually balanced out by resentment and envy.