> The first releases of Linux used a license that forbade commercial use. Some of the early contributors suggested a change to a free-software license. In the fall of 1991, Richard Stallman visited Finland and I took Linus to a talk given by Stallman. This, the pressure from contributors, and my nagging eventually convinced Linus to choose the GNU GPL license instead, in early 1992.
This just made me realize that even though I pronounce Linux as "Lee-nux" (the same way he does), I always read his name as "Lie-nus" (like the Charlie brown character).
people often use 'git' for people they think are unpleasant, but that is in order to insult them — 'git' means 'stupid person', not 'unpleasant person'
> 'git' means 'stupid person', not 'unpleasant person'
Native English speaker (UK) and I've never heard 'git' used to mean 'stupid person'. I've only ever heard it used to mean 'unpleasant person', generally in the form of "complete git" or "utter git".
(Of course, language use can be different in different countries.)
i started using linux in the mid-90s, after using commercial unices for the previous 10 years. i was amazed at how well-engineered it all was. i think i was using slack - too long ago to remember.
The only guy I knew who used commercial unixes at home back then, lived in Seattle and loved to play games.
Even got his girlfriend interested in them, which was unusual at the time.
Come to think of it, I remember one day some government goons took him away, right around that big nuclear scare. And no one has heard from him ever since.
> 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 complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time."
I owe so much to Linux and the whole free software movement, as a self-taught programmer. I set up my first Linux computer in late 1995 - it was a laptop with 4 mb of memory (which wasn't much even then) running Slackware that I'd downloaded over a modem over the course of several days.
It was so cool to realize I could examine and modify the source code for... all of it! And interact with the people who had written all of it. I was hooked. I'm still using Linux as my primary development system these days.
I recall a friend installing Slackware about this timeframe (1995), where you could select which packages you wanted. We missed groff. As a result we didn't have man pages, had no idea how to fix it, and ended up doing a re-install. I miss those days.
If you're interested in Linux history, check out Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds himself. It's written in 1999 if I recall, which is so much closer to Linux's inception than it is to today, so it's so interesting to hear thoughts and predictions about Linux at the time.
Super cheap book. I think I got my copy for $4 on ebay.
I found this book in my local library when I was in college, it was a really fun read. I had recently finished the OS course which used PintOS[1] and wanted to learn more about the development process. Unfortunately my C is still fairly rudimentary, and at this point it's going to be a bit longer before I attempt to follow Linus's path.
Great read. The first distribution I used was TAMU (https://archiveos.org/tamu/) in 1992, when Linux wasn't yet at 1.0. I had to download dozens of floppy disk images. In those days, getting X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. My five kids (all in their 20s and 30s now) grew up running Linux. It's still the OS I choose when the option is available.
Same here for RH 5.1 in ‘98. I spent most of a summer messing around with trying to get the proper video modes working on my graphics card and learning the ins and outs of X configuration. Then came the sound card…
> X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor.
The flexibility also allowed you to accomplish neat things.
I was spoiled by high res 21" workstation monitors at school, so my laptop with a 640 x 480 screen was very limiting. But, telling X that the LCD was a multiscan monitor made every other scan line go to /dev/null-- the effect was a pseudo-resolution of 640x960 with scrunched up, but very readable fonts. Ran that setup for years.
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.
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 FOSS. Latex, Linux, python, all the gnu tools, and so much more. Imagine being a researcher who needed to write any of that, or pay for all of that, in order to work. It's incredible. Thanks to everyone who codes, builds, or contributes to such projects.
Also, it's laughable how little that is recognized in the science community.
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 impact on the world is a great example to juxtapose against Linus\Linux in so many ways. Linux runs nearly everything and was given away for free and the broader public is totally unaware. Steve Jobs sells hardware and constantly played up the lion narrative as a push to make money and be important. Im more interested in the former than the lot.
Inflammatory comment? Maybe. But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.
Steve Jobs was one of the greatest marketers in recent history, and from that perspective he really was "totally dependent on them for [his] life and well-being".
Others did the work going from zero to one, he did the work of going from one to a hundred.
While I do agree with you on the effort assessment, or certainly the "trailblazing" factor... (to me, writing a kernel and operating system that could be used by the entire world before there existed a notion of what that kernel and operating system might look do that is infinitely more impressive than being a salesman)
.. I do think it's a red herring. To me it's not so much about effort than it is impact. If every person to ever write code was trying to sell a product, progress would have halted as it started. It's both the effort, the philosophy, and the philanthropy of it. Which is also what has made it thankless-ish.
Jobs figured out how to collect and amplify the efforts of talented people into a industrial organization with products that have had a world-changing impact.
I don't know how much of that is his talents and efforts and how much of that is luck of being with teams that succeeded at a time when industries he chose were rising. I wouldn't discount either the possibility that he was distinctly good and industrious... or that dozens/hundreds/thousands of people of equal distinctiveness didn't make it for arbitrary reasons. And anybody who isn't sure the rewards are equitably distributed is probably correct.
But I do recognize that functioning in such a way that you can effectively collect and amplify the efforts of talented people is a non-trivial feat.
> 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 generate hype cycles and profit off them, there's something brilliant and refreshing about FOSS and it's culture.
Steve Jobs got the private jet and the flashy keynotes, but Linus Torvalds is undoubtedly the bigger rockstar.
Woz had nothing to do with saving Apple in the 90s - and nothing for nearly 40 years - the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with in the late 90s. He was clearly smart enough to figure out how to save Apple. That’s more than “just” being a designer. 3 predecessors couldn’t figure it out and Gil Amelio wasn’t an idiot (Spindler wasn’t an idiot either - but oof talk about being out of your element)
The Apple of Wozniak is a historical footnote. Apple of today is NeXT - Jobs’ company.
A company doesn’t just succeed on technical prowess which is more where Woz’s skills lay. Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless. Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.
> 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 competed with the work Jobs was doing. The two operated in their own lanes.
> Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless.
I mean, I agree. Suffice to say that Steve Jobs could have never turned in his first Atari contract if Woz didn't do the work for him, though.
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.
You are, of course, right. Apple's UI was better. I was primarily an Amiga user, but also had a friend with an Atari ST around that time, and both their desktops were kinda ugly. Amiga got more professional looking with 2.0, but still no match for the Mac in terms of usability.
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.)
> Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.
Nah, you really think so?! Just because he was probably the most successful business leader in his generation you think he was smarter than us, HN commenters, despite our incredible feats like foreseeing the DropBox fiasco, predicting the LISP AI revival and so many others?
Kind of odd generalizing 'smart'. People have different skill sets and it's pointless comparing eg dev skills with marketing skills.
Imo, Jobs was good at making hype, that was his skill set and he was undoubtedly good at it. Woz, Torvalds, have very different skill sets from his but it's apples to oranges.
The brains behind the hardware and software of the Apple II - a remarkable accomplishment, to be sure, but even there, the marketing and packaging that Jobs contributed was not nothing. And Woz contributed nothing whatsoever to the Mac, let alone the iPod, the iPhone, or the products that came later.
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).
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.
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.
>> One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector starting with "ATDT" and the university modem-pool phone number. After recovering from this, he implemented file permissions in his kernel.
Now this nugget made my day. I love Finnish deadpan humor.
I've actually seen a rare case where a rebooting machine with messed up DMA tables managed to deliver incoming network packets to the hard drive, corrupting it. It took a bunch of really smart people a long time to figure that out.
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.
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 that.
While I agree with everything said and celebrate the availability of open source tooling for just about anything, there's an indictment in here that the possibility of researchers paying for tools they need to work is relegated to the realms of imagination.
I think I get your sentiment, but what I think is the funny part is that when you PAY for apple HW/SW you are not allowed to use it as tools, instead it's locked down.
I gave up on iOS devices a few years ago when they forbid things like 'wifi scanner' on iOS. A tool I used regularly to install and measure the quality of WiFi network/coverage.
I just love the success Linus had with managing this gigantic project while not using means of SCRUM or any of the other fancy words and systems! Sure he might not always be the friendliest but I just can not imagine Linux being successful today if it followed any of today's modern software-dev-methodologies like scrum.
I just love my linux-workhorse-daily-driver :)
Thanks Linus and everyone else who had a hand in my awesome Linux desktop.
Some friends told me they ran into Andrew Tannenbaum at Embedded World a few years ago and asked him if he still believed that Minix was better than Linux. Apparently he said yes.
If I routinely had strangers coming up to me picking arguments about something argument I made decades before (always the same thing), I'd pretty quickly come up with the minimum necessary reply to end the interaction as well.
> During this time, late spring of 1991, I wrote an implementation of the C sprintf() function for [Linus Torvalds], as he hadn't yet learned how to write functions with variable argument lists. I wanted to spare him the pain of having a different function for every type of value to write out.
That’s such a cool detail. Everyone starts somewhere.
(Shuffling off to commit change to Git and deploy to Linux…)
This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system.
What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it.
By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.
Absolutely. I remember the articles in the trade press in the mid 90s asking "Is UN*X dead?" (Hindsight of course tells us that Betteridge's law applied)
But I was working for a small ISV making a windows based GIS and our customers were putting windows boxen on every desk in the office, and then ditching either intergraph based solutions or complex systems with Tektronix terminals. Our per seat license was a rounding error in their previous costs, and you could drag a selected rectangle from our map window and drop it into a word document. I occasionally helped with sales demos and you could see when the decision was made in the faces of the senior people when they saw this.
> By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.
That's exactly how I got into Linux. I bought a book about RedHat 5.2 with a CD ROM install disc in the sleeve :) Have been using Linux on all of my personal devices (and every work device that I'm allowed to) ever since.
Oddly enough, I also had a Sparc Station 5 on my desk at one time. I remember the filesystem seemed very slow but it was cool as hell to be able to use "real Unix." I remember it even came with Internet Explorer of all things!
RH 6.2 with Ximian Desktop and Crossover for Office support was peak Linux desktop. Then Microsoft released a new version of Office that purposely screwed with Crossover, and Nat and Miguel joined hands with the Great Satan, and desktop Linux spent a decade wandering in the wilderness.
Exactly. I was in university '95-99 and had access to amazing Solaris, IRIX, AIX, and other machines, grew to love UNIX, and wanted to run it on Intel hardware at home. RH Linux did just the trick.
Are those some sort of standard teaching exercise? Because before this article I only saw them in the description of the “concurrency geek” archetype on OSDev Wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Eleanore_Semaphore.
I was born in 1989, so I missed the early days of Linux. However, I first heard of GNU and free software back in 2003 when I was looking for a free alternative to WinZip, a shareware utility for decompressing zip archives. That's when I discovered not only a free alternative (I believe it was 7zip), but also the GNU General Public License. Up until that point, I never heard of free, open-source software (this was before I heard of Mozilla as an alternative to Internet Explorer, which I found out about in early 2004, and later Firefox). I already knew how to program, but it was within the Microsoft ecosystem; I had a copy of Visual Basic and I longed for the day when I could save enough money for the entire Visual Studio suite. But once I read about free, open-source software, it was like a whole new world of software opened up to me. I was a bit of a "goody two-shoes" who didn't want to pirate software, but I couldn't afford licenses for many commercial software packages, so having access to Linux, OpenOffice, GIMP, GCC, and other applications was a very big deal to me.
One of the happiest moments of my teenage years came in 2004 when a teacher gave me his old 475MHz AMD K6-2 desktop with 64 MB RAM and Windows 98. Finally I had a computer of my own instead of using the family desktop! I downloaded and installed ZipSlack, a distribution of Slackware Linux that booted from DOS. Later that year a community college professor gave me FreeBSD installation disks. I credit these things for making me stick to a path of pursuing a career in computer science; at the time I was strongly considering majoring in linguistics, but I got entranced by operating systems and C thanks to Linux, FreeBSD, and gcc.
Nearly 20 years later it still amazes me how anyone with an Internet connection and a computer can not only download and install production-grade software that powers billion-dollar businesses absolutely for free, but also download and study the source code of these software tools for absolutely free as well. Sometimes I get pessimistic about the state of computing these days, but it's things like free, open source software that reminds me why I love computing so much and why I still pursue a career in this field.
i still remember reading when Carmack said (something like) anyone can learn to be any skill of developer, all they need is a used PC and linux CD.
this was an eye opening quote for me when i read it, for some reason. it meant that the craft of software was the most accessible in all of human crafting. really an amazing time to grow up.
Aaah, yeah, the "good old days". I got started with Linux around 1995 or so. I don't actually remember which distribution I used first, as I was experimenting a lot back then. I remember using Turbo Linux, Yggdrasil, and Slackware at times. Sometime in 95 or 96 I was a student at UNC Wilmington and I remember a bunch of us were out in the courtyard by the C.S. building when somebody came up talking about this new company called "Red Hat" that was, get this, selling Linux! That led to some rather, erm, passionate, discussion that day.
I actually wound up gravitating to Red Hat linux myself in the end, and to this day I still use RH oriented distros (mostly Fedora) for most things. And I even wound up working for Red Hat for a spell.
So yeah, Linux and his "toy" kernel definitely had a huge impact on my life over the years. And so did Bob Young and his company that had the audacity to charge money for free software. :-)
I installed slackware as a 12 year old in the early 90s. I only have 1 PC in the house (other computer was amiga 500 with no internet). My ISP only supported PPP connection which didn't work very well at the time on Linux.
Since the PC was my only source to online help I literally had to reinstall windows and then slackware every time I made an attempt at getting it working. It took probably 15-20 rounds over a couple of months but when I got it felt like the biggest accomplishment of my life.
More or less the same (12 years in 1994), however we didn't have internet until some years later. I learned pretty much everything from a Dutch Linux book (which was on the market very early) and all the HOWTOs and guides from the Linux Documentation project.
I sort of remember the first one I had. It came on a couple of 3.5 floppies. I promptly ignored it for a year or so then came back and it was 20+ of them now for slackware with hundreds of utilities I had no idea what they did. That was a ton of fun digging thru.
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 thought.
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.
The problem with BSDs was not much the lawsuits but the fact that they didn't figure out a governance model that could scale. Linux had open mailing lists and low barriers to entry, BSDs had "core" cliques. Linux begat git, a distributed VCS, when BSDs were happy with the likes of CVS, where control is rigidly centralized. Etc etc.
git didn't appear until much much later; and maintainers who can pull in code is not so different than a "core clique" with a commit bit: it's till a relatively small group of people who decide what does and doesn't get merged – it's more of a workflow thing than anything else. Of all the possible factors this seems like the least convincing one.
The "Net" in NetBSD (the first open source BSD community to coalesce after the lawsuits settled) refers to that, it's the network operating system. And not really in the sense of an OS for networks (though it certainly is that) but one from and of the network.
> 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.
"With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the installation. With BSD...it could not find the drive because I had an IDE CD-ROM and it only supported SCSI."
"It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows."
"By the time the BSD people realized they really should be supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on the same disk, Linux was way ahead."
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.
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.
BSD was Unix people used to workstations hardware so that's what they targeted on the PC. Linux was PC people who wanted it to run on whatever cheap hardware they had
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!
Not to be a GNU/Linux instigator but I remember when I first read the GPL how strange it was to have a legal document to give something away it seemed like a impish prank - will someone take it and insist you stop giving it away, or sue you when their production line breaks down.. And then the flamewars began, the pronunciation, the toolchain, freetards, 'open sores', etc. but it was the GPL making it all possible.
> In 1991, Linus wrote that Linux "won't be big and professional like gnu". In 2023. Linux is running on every continent, on every ocean, on billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars.
The Linux kernel took off after Linus receive the MINIX book, a.k.a Operating System Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum, which include the source code of MINIX. Until the arrival of the book Linus was playing "Prince Of Persia" on his new 386AT desktop.
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.
I found this article resplendent because Linux has given back to me what I put into it year after year since it launched the year I graduated college.
What I wonder is this: is there a story happening now that has similar good will for the future of AI without having commercial or social computing as its basis?
The reason I love Linux is that Linus started and finished before commercial and social concerns became the raison d'etre in software.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadMaybe it's common knowledge, but first time I've heard that. I wonder how that would have impacted adoption if it had stuck?
> The first releases of Linux used a license that forbade commercial use. Some of the early contributors suggested a change to a free-software license. In the fall of 1991, Richard Stallman visited Finland and I took Linus to a talk given by Stallman. This, the pressure from contributors, and my nagging eventually convinced Linus to choose the GNU GPL license instead, in early 1992.
Definitely in a different time and under other circumstances than Linux though.
Eunuch: /ˈjuː.nək/
Presumably the plural form retains the vowel, hence they are just a bit different.
Thanks.
Native English speaker (UK) and I've never heard 'git' used to mean 'stupid person'. I've only ever heard it used to mean 'unpleasant person', generally in the form of "complete git" or "utter git".
(Of course, language use can be different in different countries.)
thanks linus.
Even got his girlfriend interested in them, which was unusual at the time.
Come to think of it, I remember one day some government goons took him away, right around that big nuclear scare. And no one has heard from him ever since.
Hmm.
Reminds me of: "Gall’s Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time."
I owe so much to Linux and the whole free software movement, as a self-taught programmer. I set up my first Linux computer in late 1995 - it was a laptop with 4 mb of memory (which wasn't much even then) running Slackware that I'd downloaded over a modem over the course of several days.
It was so cool to realize I could examine and modify the source code for... all of it! And interact with the people who had written all of it. I was hooked. I'm still using Linux as my primary development system these days.
Super cheap book. I think I got my copy for $4 on ebay.
1: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs140-spring20/pint...
Cristi Vlăsceanu, if you're around, many thanks for the books. The OS one I gave to a Poli student that was very passionate about OSes.
The flexibility also allowed you to accomplish neat things.
I was spoiled by high res 21" workstation monitors at school, so my laptop with a 640 x 480 screen was very limiting. But, telling X that the LCD was a multiscan monitor made every other scan line go to /dev/null-- the effect was a pseudo-resolution of 640x960 with scrunched up, but very readable fonts. Ran that setup for years.
That's rich!
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.
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 FOSS. Latex, Linux, python, all the gnu tools, and so much more. Imagine being a researcher who needed to write any of that, or pay for all of that, in order to work. It's incredible. Thanks to everyone who codes, builds, or contributes to such projects.
Also, it's laughable how little that is recognized in the science community.
The modern world is underpinned by such discoveries--very accidental or curious types that go on to change the world and impact a lot of people.
To quote a Steve Job's line: "I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being" [0]
[0]: https://putsomethingback.stevejobsarchive.com/
I think the way the myth of Steve Jobs and his impact on the world is a great example to juxtapose against Linus\Linux in so many ways. Linux runs nearly everything and was given away for free and the broader public is totally unaware. Steve Jobs sells hardware and constantly played up the lion narrative as a push to make money and be important. Im more interested in the former than the lot.
Inflammatory comment? Maybe. But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.
Others did the work going from zero to one, he did the work of going from one to a hundred.
Jobs put in 100 units of effort and received N billion units of recognition for it.
.. I do think it's a red herring. To me it's not so much about effort than it is impact. If every person to ever write code was trying to sell a product, progress would have halted as it started. It's both the effort, the philosophy, and the philanthropy of it. Which is also what has made it thankless-ish.
The worst part is that he was a horrible human being. Much worse than Wozniak and probably even slightly worse than Gates.
I don't know how much of that is his talents and efforts and how much of that is luck of being with teams that succeeded at a time when industries he chose were rising. I wouldn't discount either the possibility that he was distinctly good and industrious... or that dozens/hundreds/thousands of people of equal distinctiveness didn't make it for arbitrary reasons. And anybody who isn't sure the rewards are equitably distributed is probably correct.
But I do recognize that functioning in such a way that you can effectively collect and amplify the efforts of talented people is a non-trivial feat.
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 generate hype cycles and profit off them, there's something brilliant and refreshing about FOSS and it's culture.
Steve Jobs got the private jet and the flashy keynotes, but Linus Torvalds is undoubtedly the bigger rockstar.
The Apple of Wozniak is a historical footnote. Apple of today is NeXT - Jobs’ company.
A company doesn’t just succeed on technical prowess which is more where Woz’s skills lay. Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless. Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.
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 competed with the work Jobs was doing. The two operated in their own lanes.
> Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless.
I mean, I agree. Suffice to say that Steve Jobs could have never turned in his first Atari contract if Woz didn't do the work for him, though.
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.
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.
Nah, you really think so?! Just because he was probably the most successful business leader in his generation you think he was smarter than us, HN commenters, despite our incredible feats like foreseeing the DropBox fiasco, predicting the LISP AI revival and so many others?
What leads you to such outrageous conclusion?
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Imo, Jobs was good at making hype, that was his skill set and he was undoubtedly good at it. Woz, Torvalds, have very different skill sets from his but it's apples to oranges.
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).
Why do you consider it a more trustworthy source than others?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)
I usually spawn "aplay" and pipe audio data into stdin, like it was a file.
I gave up on iOS devices a few years ago when they forbid things like 'wifi scanner' on iOS. A tool I used regularly to install and measure the quality of WiFi network/coverage.
I just love my linux-workhorse-daily-driver :) Thanks Linus and everyone else who had a hand in my awesome Linux desktop.
It looks so strange with the nose nowadays. But that was how people did it if I remember correctly.
Emojis bring some expression, but they take some away, too.
DISCLAIMER: 2nd hand story.
https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Intel+firmware+contains...
That’s such a cool detail. Everyone starts somewhere.
(Shuffling off to commit change to Git and deploy to Linux…)
What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it.
By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.
But I was working for a small ISV making a windows based GIS and our customers were putting windows boxen on every desk in the office, and then ditching either intergraph based solutions or complex systems with Tektronix terminals. Our per seat license was a rounding error in their previous costs, and you could drag a selected rectangle from our map window and drop it into a word document. I occasionally helped with sales demos and you could see when the decision was made in the faces of the senior people when they saw this.
That's exactly how I got into Linux. I bought a book about RedHat 5.2 with a CD ROM install disc in the sleeve :) Have been using Linux on all of my personal devices (and every work device that I'm allowed to) ever since.
Oddly enough, I also had a Sparc Station 5 on my desk at one time. I remember the filesystem seemed very slow but it was cool as hell to be able to use "real Unix." I remember it even came with Internet Explorer of all things!
Are those some sort of standard teaching exercise? Because before this article I only saw them in the description of the “concurrency geek” archetype on OSDev Wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Eleanore_Semaphore.
One of the happiest moments of my teenage years came in 2004 when a teacher gave me his old 475MHz AMD K6-2 desktop with 64 MB RAM and Windows 98. Finally I had a computer of my own instead of using the family desktop! I downloaded and installed ZipSlack, a distribution of Slackware Linux that booted from DOS. Later that year a community college professor gave me FreeBSD installation disks. I credit these things for making me stick to a path of pursuing a career in computer science; at the time I was strongly considering majoring in linguistics, but I got entranced by operating systems and C thanks to Linux, FreeBSD, and gcc.
Nearly 20 years later it still amazes me how anyone with an Internet connection and a computer can not only download and install production-grade software that powers billion-dollar businesses absolutely for free, but also download and study the source code of these software tools for absolutely free as well. Sometimes I get pessimistic about the state of computing these days, but it's things like free, open source software that reminds me why I love computing so much and why I still pursue a career in this field.
It cost around $100, IIRC. It also came with an incredible manual, covering the OS, C programming, system calls, etc.
this was an eye opening quote for me when i read it, for some reason. it meant that the craft of software was the most accessible in all of human crafting. really an amazing time to grow up.
I actually wound up gravitating to Red Hat linux myself in the end, and to this day I still use RH oriented distros (mostly Fedora) for most things. And I even wound up working for Red Hat for a spell.
So yeah, Linux and his "toy" kernel definitely had a huge impact on my life over the years. And so did Bob Young and his company that had the audacity to charge money for free software. :-)
Since the PC was my only source to online help I literally had to reinstall windows and then slackware every time I made an attempt at getting it working. It took probably 15-20 rounds over a couple of months but when I got it felt like the biggest accomplishment of my life.
What a fantastically cool sentence!
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 some time ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338
Some excerpts:
"With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the installation. With BSD...it could not find the drive because I had an IDE CD-ROM and it only supported SCSI."
"It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows."
"By the time the BSD people realized they really should be supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on the same disk, Linux was way ahead."
In a way it was a victory of horizontal, open, "upstart" governance, versus aristocratic and elitist organization.
[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...
Amazing
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.
As for HURD, I consider it a dead end, as it seems to have no direction and appears to have failed to move away from Mach.
It would mean one of the BSDs would have become popular instead. And we'd be better for it.
What I wonder is this: is there a story happening now that has similar good will for the future of AI without having commercial or social computing as its basis?
The reason I love Linux is that Linus started and finished before commercial and social concerns became the raison d'etre in software.