171–180 of 302 posts
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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.)
> 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.
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> 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. There were other reasons. Reusing an older comment of mine ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372063 ): My favorite theory for why Linux got a head start is in this (long) comment I found…
That was a failure of governance, which was a result of their failure to have an open development model. Linus was very liberal in accepting help from hobbyists and uncredentialed people (people who were hardware-poor, and hence needed support for stuff like dual-booting...), the BSD world has always been more opaque and closed. In a way it was a victory of horizontal, open, "upstart" governance, versus aristocratic…
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> 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.
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…
> After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter "A" on the screen, the other "B"; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel. Reminds me of: "Gall’s Law states that all co…
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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.
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> 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.
Woz left pretty much no traces on contemporary Apple. Jobs is all over the place (and, if anything, it's Tim Cook who is the underrated contributor). And for all the narrative of Woz as the unsung hero, he parlayed his fame and wealth into an impressive string of failed products, up to and including a blockchain (which, I think, is still a going concern).
What a great sense of humor this author has! I literally lol'ed at some of these jokes. It's hard to make humor shine through writing, so I'm double impressed. Some of the best, but don't deprive yourself of the whole article (because it's a gem): > More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. > Thus, mine was the first PC where…
The 2nd part of the CVS section was funny too "[...] This experience is why Linus dislikes CVS and for years refused to use any version control beyond uploading tar balls to FTP sites." It's deadpan humor in written form.