As an earlyish (1995) Linux adopter I'd heard some of these tales, like the fact that it started as a simple task scheduler that wrote a's and b's to the screen. But it's cool to hear it from someone who was actually there to witness those early events as they unfolded.
The early days of Linux
81–90 of 302 posts
Re: The early days of Linux
#82> the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. That's rich!
I literally busted out laughing! We've been waiting all these years and... we missed it?!? xD
Re: The early days of Linux
#83I love the crossover with the Prince of Persia, which was also an early computer labor of love.
Re: The early days of Linux
#84Re: The early days of Linux
#85I 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…
> 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 and elitist organization.
Re: The early days of Linux
#86One 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.
Re: The early days of Linux
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard to say. "Unix" is pronounced like "eunuchs" and yet saw pretty wide adoption. Definitely in a different time and under other circumstances than Linux though.
Yoo-nicks rather than yoo-nucks surely?
Unix: /ˈjuːnɪks/
Eunuch: /ˈjuː.nək/
Presumably the plural form retains the vowel, hence they are just a bit different.
Re: The early days of Linux
#88It's hella amazing to see how Linux has been used in so many different industries and applications, from chip design to web servers to personal computers and moree. It's a testament to the flexibility and power of the open-source model, and the ingenuity of the community that has built and maintained it over the years
Re: The early days of Linux
#89This 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.
Re: The early days of Linux
#90> We decided to release version 1.0 and arranged a release event. The Finnish computer press was invited, and a TV station even sent a crew.
Was this ever aired? Was it recorded? If so, is there a public archive of it somewhere?