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Depends on what we had instead. The fact that Wintel systems had unlocked bootloaders was absolutely critical. But it could equally have been started on any system with an MMU. Certainly it's been ported to a lot of systems.
Was it important to have a monoculture is what I'm wondering.
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Windows 3.0 and especially 3.1 were where it took over from DOS in the business world.
Windows 3.x required DOS 3+, it didn't replace DOS. NT and, on the consumer side 95, replaced DOS as the base OS.
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Was it important to have a monoculture is what I'm wondering.
The fact that linux runs on almost anything would probably have helped it in a heterogeneous environment.
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Based on the pitches I’ve seen, it’s very much the opposite. ”We are about to completely upend the X industry, with a market potential of hundreds of billions”
"We are disrupting the AI blockchain cannabis industry using state of the art AR/VR technology"
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And yet with all that ... I likely still won't understand what exactly the product or thing is or does. Meanwhile I understand Linus's email well enough.
I can't count the number of times I've read an announcement of some OSS project, gone to the project home page, read it all and still had absolutely no idea what it was, what it did or why it might be important. It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though. Getting bash and gcc working and a multithreaded FS is no mean feat, and is enough for other people to actually make useful contributions with…
Particularly when you consider that he had to do it all on bare metal.
"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code" That's kind of interesting now. Most Linux installations today coexist with a management processor running Minix. So what was a sort of mild rivalry is now a détente.
Minix had a proprietary license that forbade distributing altered copies (but not patches, but managing patches "out of tree" was unwieldy). Minix 3 is (I believe) gpl. So free of any Minix code, means, it's free software, primarily. Not really a slight against Minix, per se.
Minix 3 is BSD licensed.
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The fact that linux runs on almost anything would probably have helped it in a heterogeneous environment.
How long has that been true? It certainly started out as PC-only.
Edit: Checked wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology
1995: Linux is ported to the DEC Alpha and to the Sun SPARC. Over the following years it is ported to an ever-greater number of platforms.
Wow, fascinating. I love the detail about probably never supporting anything other than AT hard disks and 386; isn't it funny now that Linux supports more hardware than just about damn near any operating system, free or otherwise?