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Linux is 25 today
- astrodust 10y agoBeing able to install a UNIX-type operating system on my personal computer, one that was free, was a life-changing experience for me. At the time there were prohibitively expensive UNIX operating systems on the market, many of which required even more expensive proprietary hardware to run on, and then you'd have to fork out even more money for a compiler. An enormous thanks to Linus and the GNU team for changing all of that and making this accessible to pretty much anyone crazy enough to try and install it on their computer.
- jethro_tell 10y agoYou wonder what the innovation curve looks like when people are interested then can't afford the 20k per year for unix4. Someone probably would have gotten there (GUN/hurd is only 20 years away, probably because of many people working on linux instead). A lot of the innovation in tech is a result of tinkering or being able to run on a low cost platform to make the margins pencil out. This wasn't much of an option under the commercial OSs that existed before Linus started.
- stonogo 10y agoAh, google groups, the only reliable way to download more than a megabyte of data to render 1kb of text. Somewhere, I still have a copy of this message, from when it appeared in my newsreader. It would be an interesting exercise in archaeology to see if modern linux has the tools to mount that old filesystem... guess the rest of today's productivity will have to take a back seat.
- RamenJunkie_ 10y agoI really wish Google Groups could be accessed with a traditional Newsreader (all the way back).
- flukus 10y agoAnd a useless mobile version that takes you to the landing page instead of the link you want.
- JonathonW 10y agoI'm pretty sure a filesystem from back then should be mountable-- the filesystem Linus implemented for the first iterations of Linux was the MINIX filesystem, and there's still a kernel driver for it [1]. I don't have a filesystem from back then to actually try it, though. [1] http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/fs/minix/ http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/fs/minix/
- brs 10y agoWell, another five years until it shows up on http://olduse.net/ http://olduse.net/ (which is worth a nostalgic browse if you haven't tried it)
- TheLarch 10y agoI'm not usually nostalgic but my circa 1994 Slackware CD distro is special. Incidentally I can't overemphasize how far basic sysadmin skills will get you.
- rconti 10y agoAh, memories of my Slackware (kernel 1.2.8) CD set. Whatever version of LILO it shipped with munged the lilo.conf, and hence MBR, every time you ran it. Trial by fire. Good times.
- Florin_Andrei 10y agoI still remember looking at the screen showing "LIL" at the top. Damn it, what else went wrong this time around?
- CaptSpify 10y agoOr: LILILILILILILILI
- parshimers 10y agoAh, very fond memories indeed. See also: XFree86.conf .
- girvo 10y ago
- eloy 10y agoNO! It is GNU/Lin.. oh wait... Congrats Torvalds, thanks for changing the world!
- jff 10y ago> Most of these seem possible (the tty structure already has stubs for window size), except maybe for the user-mode filesystems And thus Linus dug a hole out of which Linux has only recently begun to clamber.
- elliotec 10y agoI love all the parentheses (including nested parentheses!) in that introduction post from Linus, and how he's careful to make it clear that it's just a hobby and not professional.
- w8rbt 10y agoHe probably had a few Lisp classes in college.
- tokenizerrr 10y ago> I don't want to be on the machine when someone is spawning >64 processes, though. Ha.
- aidos 10y agoCan someone explain how there's a post in the middle of this from before it all started? "Thanks for creating Linux." 24/06/2011 John
- justinsaccount 10y agoFrom before? That was posted 5 years ago on the 20th anniversary.
- aidos 10y agoAhhhhhhh oops. Dates are hard!:-)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- billforsternz 10y agoIt's really amusing to see Linus in humble, I'm not really worthy, it's just a hobby, it might be interesting to someone perhaps, etc. mode.
- gghh 10y agoSince git was born in 2005, the git repository has not even half of Linux' history.
- Rovanion 10y agoDepends on the pace at which development has accelerated since then.
- Maken 10y agoThey seem to plan to port the early source control history into git, but it seems to be a WIT https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1da177e4c3f41524e88...
- anarazel 10y agoThere's https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/history/history.git/ https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/history/history... which you can graft to happen before that commit. Or just look at separately if you're lazy ;)
- EdSharkey 10y agoMost big and fancy things like Linux start out humble and pokey. Linux inspires me to do great things!!
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoLinux is amazing! From 86% of the world's smartphones to pretty much all of the top500 supercomputers to millions of Chromebooks in schools to tens of millions of critical servers to umpteen embedded uses I've never even heard of! Linus must be considered one of the greatest project managers ever (seriously!)...results don't lie. His manner is almost identical to Leslie Groves, who managed both the construction of the Pentagon and then the Manhattan Project (greatest engineering project in history). Some tasks seem to demand people who don't need to be liked. It is just incredible that we can use something as awesome as Linux in a free and open manner. Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss!
- vacri 10y ago> Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss! He's not a jerk. People just like to post writings of his, out of context. My favourite out-of-context post of his was here on HN where it was the typical "oo, isn't Linus sweary!" porn. It was post ~150 of a mailthread, and he was blowing up at a user. I went back through the thread, and this was post #12 of Linus's, and most of his previous comments were politely trying to help that same user understand a concept. The user was being dickish and probably intentionally obstructive.
- flukus 10y agoSame thing happened with the vim/neovim split. Bram gets the blame for being obstructive because he wouldn't unquestioningly accept a patch.
- flukus 10y ago> Thanks Linus! I don't care if you're a jerk, you deliver like a freaking boss! When you put it into perspective like that, he's not a jerk, just someone who has had a statistically insignificant number of bad days. I'd like to see any other person on earth deal with their project being pulled in that many directions and act like a saint. I'd have told you all to go and get fucked long ago.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoLinux and Linus are amazing, but let's give our props to another humongous catalyst to the open-source, free software movement: Stallman and gcc. RMS and his grudge against the brain drain at MIT single-handedly changed the free software movement forever.
- thearn4 10y ago> brain drain at MIT I haven't really heard about this part of his motivation. What was going on at MIT that made him feel that there was a brain drain in progress?
- Mikeb85 10y agohttps://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html > In 1981, the spin-off company Symbolics had hired away nearly all of the hackers from the AI Lab, and the depopulated community was unable to maintain itself.
- cmdrfred 10y agoBeen a full time Linux user for over a year now. Windows 10 pushed me off the Microsoft treadmill. The future is Linux, everything else will be an historical oddity.
- electricEmu 10y agoI don't see a world benefited by a monoculture operating system anymore than I see it happening.
- sounds 10y agoThis is not a monoculture! - Theo de Raadt :)
- crudbug 10y agoIBM backing Linux was the tipping point.
- yolesaber 10y agoI remember when they showed commercials during the Super Bowl about Linux. My 12-year-old geek self couldn't believe it! I had a bunch of older people at my parent's party asking me about Linux. Felt cool to be able to show off my home built computer running slackware to a bunch of adults who often chastised me for being in the basement too much :)
- loafoe 10y agoRemember getting Linux root and boot diskette images via FTP mail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPmail) and downloading them using UUCP on a "superfast" 9600 baud dialup connection. Thx Linus!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Whostasay 10y agoLink for this article goes off to some unrelated page (it's not related to Linux is 25, it's related to MINIX).
- stockerta 10y agoIts the original post in which Linus introduced his minix clone linux.
- itgoon 10y agoHuh. What am I going to do with this old 386. This article says this..."Linux" thing will work on it. Damn. That's a lot of floppies. Well, I'll be damned. It works! Let's see if I can't get this Apache web server (what silly names! Tee hee!) to go. Ha! That works better than (whatever I was using - I forget). (still using it)