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The early days of Linux

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Re: The early days of Linux

#221

Post by kyaghmour »

bcantrill wrote: post #75
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…

I don't know that you were necessarily thinking of this, but I did write a piece on exactly this in 2004.[0][1] I couldn't really find anything else at the time that was talking about this, so if you did/do find something else, I would love to read it! [0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft... [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/12/16/the-economics-of-soft...

Thanks for this. I'll take a look.

Re: The early days of Linux

#222

Post by pcthrowaway »

smoldesu wrote: post #91
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…

> 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…

I think some of this is because people don't have the same freedom to tinker with things for fun or altruism without a profit motive, because life is so much more unaffordable now. Generations Y, Z and α are all struggling to just survive let alone potentially retire.

Re: The early days of Linux

#223

Post by johnny22 »

nortonham wrote: post #173
toyg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BSD's aren't really opaque. I understand what larger point you're trying to make about the difference between linux and bsd development. But the biggest BSD projects all have mailing lists where you can see the decisions being made, and the source of the core of each one is available to everyone.

was that the case during the referenced time period? I think it's more about back then rather than now.

Re: The early days of Linux

#224

Post by Jenda_ »

ofalkaed wrote: post #189
deckard1 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of how I nuked my first Linux drive. I was using the cthugha[1] music visualizer app. You had to pass in a CD-ROM device as well as a DSP device (long before ALSA existed). Instead of the DSP I probably passed in my hard drive. Whoops. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)

I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun. I spent many hours back in the day just using bash scripting to make sound, I never got things good enough to make any worthwhile music but I did enjoy myself. Never accidentally specified /dev/hda instead of dsp but I did once do rm -r /usr instead of ./usr, switched to always using absolute paths for such things after…

> I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun.

I usually spawn "aplay" and pipe audio data into stdin, like it was a file.

Re: The early days of Linux

#225

Post by brewtide »

kragen wrote: post #171
riceart wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

yes, after 24 years of operations, during most of which they had a monopoly on the world's fastest computers

No matter that subject, we all get hung up on the notion of forever, versus effective duration of use case of creations.

Re: The early days of Linux

#226

Post by snvzz »

zajio1am wrote: post #213
snvzz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only if Linus actually listened to Tanenbaum. We could have a nice microkernel, multiserver design, instead of what we have. And we wouldn't have to deprecate Linux (soon now) to replace it with something better architected.

There were several microkernel-based research/hobby/free kernels in early 1990s, like L4, VSTa, or even HURD. Perhaps the reason why Linux succeeded as a general purpose OS (and not one of these) is because of its conservative design.

Let's suppose it ended up like that.

It would mean one of the BSDs would have become popular instead. And we'd be better for it.

Re: The early days of Linux

#227

Post by KerrAvon »

icedchai wrote: post #168
smoldesu wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 remember them, and I have to tell you the Commodore and Atari 68k machines were not obvious winners. Ugly software, ugly hardware. I know this isn’t what fans of those machines want to hear, but Apple’s design aesthetic blew them and the PC away; Apple was simply in another league.

Late 80’s Macs had the best user experience available. Again, this isn’t a popular take, but it is absolutely true. “Apple’s marketing prowess is what sold them” is bullshit; Apple was better at selling, but not so much better that it could overcome perceivably middle of the road products. Apple’s industrial and UI design led the industry. Everybody else followed.

Re: The early days of Linux

#228

Post by KerrAvon »

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.

“Becoming Steve Jobs” is the book to read. Isaacson’s book is terrible.

Re: The early days of Linux

#229

Post by KerrAvon »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #163
killjoywashere wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

“all he did was hype” is a sure indicator that they don’t understand what Steve Jobs actually did

Re: The early days of Linux

#230

Post by Accujack »

krossitalk wrote: post #10

> the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. That's rich!

I remember running X the first time on Linux just after it was reported working because I happened to have the exact chipset that Peter MacDonald supported in my 386 at the time. We ran it off of a boot and root floppy - both 3.5", 1.44MB disks.

We didn't do much with it at the time, but it was a big deal... we had only run X on workstations before that, and they were expensive and few and far between.

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