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The early days of Linux

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Re: The early days of Linux

#161

Post by matwood »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #116
smoldesu wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Just" heh. Jobs is arguably one of the best product people in history.

Re: The early days of Linux

#162

Post by anthk »

geocar wrote: post #134
MarkusWandel wrote: post #86

One big takeaway is how close the real Unix (in the form of 386BSD) came to being where Linux is today. If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows.

> If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. I doubt that. Real Unix was a pretty horrible experience for a lot of hobbyists starting right from the disklabel, and many of those smug bastards where pretty horrible people to hobbyists. The fact Linux worked on crap hardware meant people who could only afford crap hardware could learn it, and get good at it. Linux overtook Re…

Also, alternatives coming from Linux vs "the corporate Unix" often used far less memory and CPU and ran much faster.

XTerm vs Rxvt

Fvwm vs CDE

Netscape/Mozilla vs Dillo

Irix' MWM vs JWM

Re: The early days of Linux

#163

Post by paulryanrogers »

killjoywashere wrote: post #158
earthscienceman wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

I think most of these opinion threads about Steve Jobs should be unhooked and connected to a root thread that points to Walter Isaacson's biography. It's painfully obvious most people haven't read it.

What makes it so obvious folks haven't read it?

Why do you consider it a more trustworthy source than others?

Re: The early days of Linux

#164

Post by thewanderer1983 »

I started using Linux in my early teen years. I'm now 39. When I started I had dial up internet and it took me a week to get my Win Modem to work. I would boot into Win95 join a IRC server like dalnet, jump on #Linuxhelp and ask for suggestions. Reboot the system into Linux and try it out. Then repeat.

I think the early community deserves a big thanks, especially those on IRC.

Re: The early days of Linux

#165

Post by riceart »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #160
riceart wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cray Research allegedly spent $0 on marketing and, if true, sort of did succeed directly because of technical prowess.

And they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and were bought for a file sale price by SGI (I think Cray could have used some high quality market research in the 80s.)

Re: The early days of Linux

#166

Post by commandersaki »

newswasboring wrote: post #89

This has to be the funniest tech article I have ever read. I was literally laughing out loud. I don't even remember the last time I had such an emotional response to a tech article. Probably it was something by whytheluckystiff back in my teenage.

Lars has written about his interactions with Linus before in this article: https://liw.fi/linux20/

I fondly remember these lines:

    That summer, I re-connected with my fellow students from the university, 
    including Linus. One of the students a few years older than Linus and me, 
    Patrik, had a sauna in the building he lived, and he booked it once a week 
    for the group of us. You perverts who think the word sauna is a synonym for 
    brothel can stop imagining orgies: in Finland, saunas are for bathing, 
    medication, even meditation, not sex.

    There’s a semi-famous picture of Linus, looking naked, drinking beer. The 
    picture was taken at Patrik’s, by a fellow student, Stina, and Linus is 
    wearing trousers, but it was a hot summer day, so he didn’t have his shirt 
    on. No orgies. Really.

Re: The early days of Linux

#168

Post by icedchai »

smoldesu wrote: post #155
riceart wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with 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 c…

Yep, Apple needed them both. The Apple II was there early, but by the mid-80's it was very overpriced for its capabilities, compared to the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bits. It needed Jobs' marketing abilities.

Late 80's and 90's Apple survived purely because of marketing. Both Commodore and Atari had them beat technically, with the Amiga and ST. Remember, both of those could emulate the Mac and were half the price.

Re: The early days of Linux

#169

Post by kikoreis »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #86

One big takeaway is how close the real Unix (in the form of 386BSD) came to being where Linux is today. If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows.

Well, the reason Linus could confidently choose to license the kernel as GPLv2 is exactly because it inherited no incompatibly-licensed code.

USL v. BSDi (also 1992 — what a year!) is evidence of how non-trivial this actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

Re: The early days of Linux

#170

Post by arp242 »

toyg wrote: post #50
kyaghmour wrote: post #30

I 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 tho…

The problem with BSDs was not much the lawsuits but the fact that they didn't figure out a governance model that could scale. Linux had open mailing lists and low barriers to entry, BSDs had "core" cliques. Linux begat git, a distributed VCS, when BSDs were happy with the likes of CVS, where control is rigidly centralized. Etc etc.

git didn't appear until much much later; and maintainers who can pull in code is not so different than a "core clique" with a commit bit: it's till a relatively small group of people who decide what does and doesn't get merged – it's more of a workflow thing than anything else. Of all the possible factors this seems like the least convincing one.
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