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Somewhat related to AT commands, there's a collection of anecdotes from Linus Torvalds' old officemate in Uni Helsinki, one time Linus had a brainfart while try

Somewhat related to AT commands, there's a collection of anecdotes from Linus Torvalds' old officemate in Uni Helsinki, one time Linus had a brainfart while trying to dial into his ISP, the result of which was that his harddisk bootsector ended up beginning with the string "ATDT " and his ISP's phone number. The next day Linus implemented permission controls. Sadly DDG and Google can't find me anything with those keywords. Either that story has disappeared off the web, or search engines really suck nowadays. Edit: Well, I found it, but I had to go to a blog where the story was quoted, and the blog author had written down the link not as a hyperlink: https://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/ https://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/

nico 4y ago
> Either that story has disappeared off the web, or search engines really suck nowadays. Given you found the story, it seems like it hadn’t disappeared off the web. However, search engines might suck.
hulitu 4y ago
> If we play our cards right, the Linux penguin could be the next mass-consumer hit product. Can you imagine a Windows flag competing against our penguin?
dezgeg 4y ago
Hmm, there is a different 'accidental hard drive dialing' story in his autobiography (Just for Fun) - where that happened in Minix and as a result Linus chose to move to Linux full-time: > But in December, I mistakenly auto-dialed my hard disk instead of my modem. I was trying to auto-dial /dev/tty1, which is the serial line. But by mistake I auto-dialed /dev/hda1, which is the hard disk device. The end result was that I inadvertently overwrote some of the most critical parts of the of the partition where I had Minix. Yes, that meant I couldn’t boot Minix anymore. > > That was the point where I had a decision to make: I could reinstall Minix, or I could bite the bullet and acknowledge that Linux was good enough that I didn’t need Minix. I would write the programs to compile Linux, under itself, and whenever I felt I needed Minix I would just add the desired feature to Linux. It’s a big conceptual step when you drop the original hosting environment and truly make a program self-hosting, so big that I released the new version as 0.10 in late November. Of course, maybe he did do the same mistake twice :)

nico 4y ago

> Either that story has disappeared off the web, or search engines really suck nowadays. Given you found the story, it seems like it hadn’t disappeared off the web. However, search engines might suck.

hulitu 4y ago

> If we play our cards right, the Linux penguin could be the next mass-consumer hit product. Can you imagine a Windows flag competing against our penguin?

dezgeg 4y ago

Hmm, there is a different 'accidental hard drive dialing' story in his autobiography (Just for Fun) - where that happened in Minix and as a result Linus chose to move to Linux full-time: > But in December, I mistakenly auto-dialed my hard disk instead of my modem. I was trying to auto-dial /dev/tty1, which is the serial line. But by mistake I auto-dialed /dev/hda1, which is the hard disk device. The end result was that I inadvertently overwrote some of the most critical parts of the of the partition where I had Minix. Yes, that meant I couldn’t boot Minix anymore. > > That was the point where I had a decision to make: I could reinstall Minix, or I could bite the bullet and acknowledge that Linux was good enough that I didn’t need Minix. I would write the programs to compile Linux, under itself, and whenever I felt I needed Minix I would just add the desired feature to Linux. It’s a big conceptual step when you drop the original hosting environment and truly make a program self-hosting, so big that I released the new version as 0.10 in late November. Of course, maybe he did do the same mistake twice :)