151–160 of 302 posts
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.
I wonder how much the overconfidence played in making it a success.
Circa 1996 I was getting my CS degree. At the same time, I got a job at a small local company running an ISP on the side. A dozen Hayes modems hooked up to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. And two PCs (named "hops" and "barley") running Slackware. That was my first experience with Linux. It was a barbaric OS compared to the Unix workstations we had in the CS department running HP/UX and SunOS. But it had promise..…
SunOS was also pretty bare bones, if I remember correctly. CS departments had to install a ton of 3rd party software to give you a usable system.
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=82134...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_lin...
The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme.
Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now.
Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time.
Software packaging... fun times.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Intel+firmware+contains...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same with Woz, the actual brains behind Apple. Jobs was just a charismatic designer and salesman.
Woz had nothing to do with saving Apple in the 90s - and nothing for nearly 40 years - the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with in the late 90s. He was clearly smart enough to figure out how to save Apple. That’s more than “just” being a designer. 3 predecessors couldn’t figure it out and Gil Amelio wasn’t an idiot (Spindler wasn’t an idiot eith…
It's fair to say that success can be attributed to the Apple II, which without Woz wouldn't exist. Yes, he did not make the iPod - but he bolstered Steve when his technical council was empty and was content doing so for next-to-nothing. There's no need to belittle his actions, obviously nothing he did competed with the work Jobs was doing. The two operated in their own lanes.
> Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless.
I mean, I agree. Suffice to say that Steve Jobs could have never turned in his first Atari contract if Woz didn't do the work for him, though.
I miss the days when Slack didn’t mean a chat app.
Strange days
I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 impac…
I'm wondering, is there any tutorial to guide one from a bootloader to a very early version of Linux (but already have the barebone programs)? I guess any serious OS Dev course will do that, but would be interesting to find one specifically focused on Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same with Woz, the actual brains behind Apple. Jobs was just a charismatic designer and salesman.
Woz had nothing to do with saving Apple in the 90s - and nothing for nearly 40 years - the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with in the late 90s. He was clearly smart enough to figure out how to save Apple. That’s more than “just” being a designer. 3 predecessors couldn’t figure it out and Gil Amelio wasn’t an idiot (Spindler wasn’t an idiot eith…