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The early days of Linux (2023)

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Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#41

Post by vednig »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #38
qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history. Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.

> Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time.

It's rather the opposite, combined with moral stance of Linus and it's core committee itself that has managed to kept Linux on this track so far.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#42

Post by ahazred8ta »

klysm wrote: post #19

It’s a weird feeling to be young enough to never have experienced a world without Linux, but be close enough in time to its creation that many of the people involved are still around. My entire professional career has mostly revolved around it in some capacity. My entire life even since age like 12? It’s pretty crazy to think about the impact it has had on my life

Note the classic "Linux is a 10 year old boy" ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#44

Post by ggm »

Was used to using pdp11/vax based systems moving to Suns and other workstations, and for a number of reasons the initial launch floppies of linux felt "under cooked" compared to the BSD systems also being released for larger Intel chips with MMU. But, the killer side of this was the linux code ran on smaller Intel boxes, probably a little better than Minix did.

when 386BSD got it's act together, it became less apparent but very quickly impetus got behind the distro "scene" and Linux took off like a rocket.

Those first early days, no real network stack, minimal desktop support, it was line-and-ball. Mainly, I think the BSD lawsuit/licence issues was the negative energy source in BSD occupying the ground.

I had an IBM PC/RT at the time running the 4.3bsd port which was just lovely. But such clunky hardware. PCs were coming into their own and IBM didn't want to keep playing in multiple OS and had AIX coming through and the ROMP chip was getting old. Once graphics display cards on PCI emerged along with decent cheap ethernet cards, and then ethernet on the motherboard I think it was game over. (although for obvious reasons most people's experience of network was modem on serial)

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#45

Post by wolfi1 »

qingcharles wrote: post #16

TIL: Linus is a Swedish speaking Finn; and those are a thing. This sound has lived rent-free in my head since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg

classic, was on the search for it. I can remember, there was a file on the ftp sites called linus.au (the original I presume, since .ogg hasn't been invented at the time), there was a non-english version as well (finnish?). glad it survived somehow. thank you for the link

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#47

Post by skissane »

femto wrote: post #24
linsomniac wrote: post #8

One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have…

It's interesting to ponder whether we would all be using GNU Hurd if Linux didn't exist.

More likely we’d all be using FreeBSD

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#48

Post by stevekemp »

qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

I do remember there was some point in the mid/late 90s where I had to do a lot of research before buying [desktop] computers and hardware - would this specific network card be supported? Would this graphics card work with X11? etc. Maybe it was trauma and paranoia from the WinModems of the day, that were never going to work.

But by the early 2000s we seemed to switch to a world where I just assumed Linux would support my new hardware, be it a used Zip-drive, a web-cam, or whatever.

These days I'm the same. I fearlessly buy random motherboards, and hardware toys, and just assume they work. So far I've been lucky, but it is a real testament to the driver-developers. The lone developer who makes one pull-request against the kernel solely to add the magic numbers to recognize yet another kind of SD-card, or similar. Really benefits us all, even if they never do another thing.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#49

Post by weinzierl »

klysm wrote: post #19

It’s a weird feeling to be young enough to never have experienced a world without Linux, but be close enough in time to its creation that many of the people involved are still around. My entire professional career has mostly revolved around it in some capacity. My entire life even since age like 12? It’s pretty crazy to think about the impact it has had on my life

I feel similar for Computer Science as a whole field. It's weird to think that many of its founding fathers were still during a significant portion of my life.

Claude Shannon 2001

Edsger Dijkstra 2012

John McCarthy 2011

Niklaus Wirth 2024

Konrad Zuse 1995

Alonzo Church 1995

Jim Gray 2007/2012

Grace Hopper 1992

Even Alan Turing could still have been alive during my lifetime hadn't he been murdered.

Friedrich L. Baur, who died in 2015, still had an office at my university when I studied there and I often passed by, saw his name plate, and wondered if this was all real.

Luckily Donald Knuth is still around.

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