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"Nerds 2.0.1" by Stephen Segaller, 1999 I picked up a copy at Borders and read it over a summer. Fantastic. I still have my copy. "Code" by Charles Petzold, 2

"Nerds 2.0.1" by Stephen Segaller, 1999 I picked up a copy at Borders and read it over a summer. Fantastic. I still have my copy. "Code" by Charles Petzold, 2000 There's a new edition as of 2022. I love Petzold's writing. If you did anything Win32 at the end of the 90s you probably did too. "In the Beginning... was the Command Line." Neal Stephenson, 1999 I remember this book being fun to read. It was the time when acolytes of Stallman ran amok and Windows was doomed to perish leaving Linux to inherit the world.

msla 4y ago
> I remember this book being fun to read. It was the time when acolytes of Stallman ran amok and Windows was doomed to perish leaving Linux to inherit the world. Maybe I was more pessimistic, but I remember that era as waiting for the hammer to fall: Microsoft was becoming more powerful, bringing more and more hardware under its effective sway, with Linux drivers being either nonexistent or only working on a subset of what was out there. It was an era of Winmodems ("modems" that were crappy sound cards that hooked up to a phone line, with all of the modem functionality being done in the Windows-only driver) and "Linux on Laptops" being more theory than practice. Heck, a common way to get WiFi was NDISWrapper, which ran a Windows driver in a "container" of some kind because it wasn't feasible to reverse-engineer the hardware and do it right. And later there was Palladium, and the spectrum of boot signing locking out all non-Windows OSes forever, on pains of legal prosecution. It's much better now, even in the x86 world.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It was really the era of "Linux on the Desktop" - for some reason everyone assumed the war would be fought there, on the desktop, against Windows 98 and successors. But Linux just absolutely destroyed everyone and everything in the server world which became huge with the explosion of the WWW. And servers just needed a CPU, memory, disk, and an ethernet card.
  - msla 4y ago
    I agree that Linux crushed it on the server platforms, but it got better for Linux on the desktop, too: Linux users now have multiple companies specializing in selling computers with Linux pre-installed, staking their brands on the idea that Linux will work well on those systems, as opposed to "it runs but don't expect hibernation to function and you'll need NDISWrapper for WiFi" or some similar list of caveats which always seemed to accompany Linux on most systems where the hardware wasn't hand-picked. Even Office formats have gotten friendlier, going from explicitly MS-specific stuff like .doc to the Office Open XML file formats, which are, if not easy to parse, at least not the serialization format of a proprietary program. And, of course, every web browser that's worth a damn treats Linux as a first-class platform. That matters more now than it did in the past. The world could definitely improve. However, compared to the darkest fantasies someone could reasonably entertain during Ballmer-era Microsoft, we're doing pretty damn good.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The main difference is that everyone basically thought you had to win the desktop to “win” - nobody foresaw the real application of the Internet and mobile phones (Linux as Android helped quite a bit). Some credit is also due to Mac - if you support windows and Mac via one of the cross-platform toolkits you often get Linux “for free” or close to it.

msla 4y ago

> I remember this book being fun to read. It was the time when acolytes of Stallman ran amok and Windows was doomed to perish leaving Linux to inherit the world. Maybe I was more pessimistic, but I remember that era as waiting for the hammer to fall: Microsoft was becoming more powerful, bringing more and more hardware under its effective sway, with Linux drivers being either nonexistent or only working on a subset of what was out there. It was an era of Winmodems ("modems" that were crappy sound cards that hooked up to a phone line, with all of the modem functionality being done in the Windows-only driver) and "Linux on Laptops" being more theory than practice. Heck, a common way to get WiFi was NDISWrapper, which ran a Windows driver in a "container" of some kind because it wasn't feasible to reverse-engineer the hardware and do it right. And later there was Palladium, and the spectrum of boot signing locking out all non-Windows OSes forever, on pains of legal prosecution. It's much better now, even in the x86 world.

bombcar 4y ago
It was really the era of "Linux on the Desktop" - for some reason everyone assumed the war would be fought there, on the desktop, against Windows 98 and successors. But Linux just absolutely destroyed everyone and everything in the server world which became huge with the explosion of the WWW. And servers just needed a CPU, memory, disk, and an ethernet card.
- msla 4y ago
  I agree that Linux crushed it on the server platforms, but it got better for Linux on the desktop, too: Linux users now have multiple companies specializing in selling computers with Linux pre-installed, staking their brands on the idea that Linux will work well on those systems, as opposed to "it runs but don't expect hibernation to function and you'll need NDISWrapper for WiFi" or some similar list of caveats which always seemed to accompany Linux on most systems where the hardware wasn't hand-picked. Even Office formats have gotten friendlier, going from explicitly MS-specific stuff like .doc to the Office Open XML file formats, which are, if not easy to parse, at least not the serialization format of a proprietary program. And, of course, every web browser that's worth a damn treats Linux as a first-class platform. That matters more now than it did in the past. The world could definitely improve. However, compared to the darkest fantasies someone could reasonably entertain during Ballmer-era Microsoft, we're doing pretty damn good.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The main difference is that everyone basically thought you had to win the desktop to “win” - nobody foresaw the real application of the Internet and mobile phones (Linux as Android helped quite a bit). Some credit is also due to Mac - if you support windows and Mac via one of the cross-platform toolkits you often get Linux “for free” or close to it.