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Was Eunuchs, an OS that runs only on 8088 CPUs, a joking reference to Linux?
by GTP 3y ago
Was Eunuchs, an OS that runs only on 8088 CPUs, a joking reference to Linux?
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoLSL2 was released in 1988. The first Linux kernel release was in 1991 and required an 80386 or later.
- fasa99 3y agoSo LSL2 came out in 1988, Linux in 1991, so definitely NOT a reference to Linux. However both the game and Linux are a reference to Unix (Bell Labs, released in 1970s). The LSL2 developers clearly knew about Unix. And the play on word "Eunuchs / Unix" is a reversal of the pun of the original Unix i.e. the authors of Unix were themselves making a pun on the word "Eunuchs". Here, what Unix was "castrating" was an even earlier (1960s?) operating system called Multics developed by Ken Thompson, who got frustrated by all the bloat and complexity, so sought to castrate down the complexity by writing the now famous Unix, whose paradigm spread far and wide and was re-implemented in Linux.
- dhosek 3y agoUm, not sure if you’re joking or just young, but you have heard of this thing called Unix, right?
- GTP 3y agoYes, I know about it, it's just that Linux come first to mind due to all the early discussions about it being Torvalds' toy project. Plus I assumed Unix supported also other architectures, given how much variety there was in the early days.
- dhosek 3y agoLeisure Suit Larry predates Linux by quite a bit (as I recall the first 8-bit versions of the game came out in the early 80s). As for Unix, in the olden days there were a lot of Unix variations (so there was a tendency to refer to ix as a generic term for all the variations) running on any platform that was at least 16-bit (I don’t think* there were ever any 8-bit Unix variations, but I could be wrong).
- aricz 3y agoThe first Leisure Suit Larry game was released 1987.
- dhosek 3y agoHuh, I was pretty sure that it was out while I was in high school so before 1986, but I guess that must have been some other adult video game paving the way for LSL.
- aricz 3y agoMaybe you were thinking of Softporn Adventure from 1981. It's a text adventure game by Sierra (at the time they were called On-Line Systems), and Leisure Suit Larry 1 is a graphical adaption of it. Source Wikipedia.
- gattilorenz 3y agoAlso, an 8088 cannot run Linux (but it can ran ELKS, which at least has "Linux" in the acronym), while there were a few Unices for 8086-class CPUs - with SCO Xenix being probably the most functional of them all.
- anthk 3y agoMinix can.
- gattilorenz 3y agoYes, but technically an Unix-like :) There were a couple more, Coherent (also Unix-like) and PC/IX come to mind too
- zenexer 3y agoNeither. It’s a play on “Unix.”