Well when Linux came out I was just annoyed that I hadn't been the one to do it. A friend of mine (the author of TinyMush) and I were certainly thinking about

Well when Linux came out I was just annoyed that I hadn't been the one to do it. A friend of mine (the author of TinyMush) and I were certainly thinking about it at the time (I had embedded OS design experience, but none with virtual memory so maybe we would not have pulled it off). Also don't forget that the enabling technology was gcc and there was the example of Minix. We did contribute to the floppy driver. The original driver read a block at a time before incurring a rotational latency. I had had enough of this slowness with SCO Xenix, so added a track buffer to speed it up on Linux. My friend wrote the original generic SCSI driver, to support a film scanner. I think we may have made one of the earliest products using Linux. We worked for an entrepreneur who started a business selling medical image archiving and teleradiography equipment. In those days, ct-scan machines and MRI machines had no networking. To get images from them you had to capture the image sent to the console screen or use the 3M laser camera parallel interface. (My job was to make cards for this capturing). Image transfer was over phone lines using sz/rz and Telebit Trailblazer modems. Anyway, at some point one machine did have network (I think it was some proprietary interface, not DICOM). The problem was that Linux did not yet have a networking stack. The solution? Use "KA9Q", the amateur radio TCP/IP stack in userspace for this. At some point Pat Volkerding (Slackware) also worked with us. I remember he was a big deadhead at the time, wrote Slackware while living in parent's basement. We were half installing / half developing a teleradiography system after hours in Eastern Long Island Hospital.