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Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03 163

Posted by CowboyNeal from the turn-back-the-clock dept.
eldavojohn writes "Following our last history lesson of Linux 0.01, the Kernel Trap is talking about the following announcements that would lead to one of the greatest operating systems today. A great Linus quote on release 0.02 (just 19 days after 0.01): 'I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.'"
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Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03 More

Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03

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  • Never use a 1.0 Release (Score:5, Funny)

    by Crypto Gnome ( 651401 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:18PM (#20096877) Homepage Journal
    Of course, in this case it applies even more so.

    Never use a 0.01 Release, especially not in a production environment.

  • 15 years later... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:21PM (#20096909)
    and the Hurd is still just around the corner. :(

    • Re:15 years later... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:27PM (#20096961) Homepage Journal
      More ironic: the Linux kernel is slowly becoming a hybrid monolithic/micro-kernel.

      • Re:15 years later... (Score:5, Funny)

        by jsse ( 254124 ) on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:48AM (#20097465) Homepage Journal

        More ironic: the Linux kernel is slowly becoming a hybrid monolithic/micro-kernel.
        Linux lost its status of being a micro-kernel since kernel 0.1, a mini-kernel; and since kernel 1.0.0, it has become a macro-kernel. Sad thing to see they work toward the wrong way of technology advancement.

        I'm in the progress of releasing a nano-kernel, kernel 0.000001, which could make me the coolest geek alive on earth.

        Excuse me while these two nice gentlemen tie me up on my bed with the nice long sleeves I wear.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Opportunist ( 166417 )
          I'm in the progress of releasing a nano-kernel, kernel 0.000001, which could make me the coolest geek alive on earth.

          Fine, but will it run Linux?
          • It's an alternative to Linux... ...And, on the basis of his username, I suspect it might be called jssex.
        • I'm running Linux on this new fangled thing called microcomputer, so obviously it must be a microkernel.
      • I don't want to start the everlasting monolithic/microkernel flame war up again, but I think it's pretty clear that it's only the pace at which hardware has advanced in the last decade or so that has allowed Linux to continue monolithically.

        There's a lot to be said for the microkernel architecture, and if Moore's Law ever does start to level off, then I think we're going to see a move away from monolithic designs for good. It's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on, and only a very small body of users can be expected to ever compile their own. (True, you can always recompile a specialized version of a monolithic kernel, ripping out all the stuff you don't need, but this is a PITA and it only becomes harder as the thing gets bigger.)

        Along with probably most other Linux users, I've always wondered how things would be if Tanenbaum had released MINIX under a free license earlier in the game (Torvalds has said at several points that had MINIX been more free, he probably would have simply modified it, keeping its architecture, but since Tanenbaum had no interest in "turn[ing] MINIX in BSD UNIX" [1]...the rest, of course, is history.)

        Or perhaps more interestingly, what would have happened if a free version of BSD had been produced for low-end hardware just a little earlier than it actually was. (In reality, 386BSD came out in a working form in July 1992 [so sayeth Wikipedia], nine months after the first Linux release, and 4.4BSDLite didn't come out until '94 [2].) It seems to me that had "real UNIX" been available for low-end systems in the early 90s, much of the impetus to create a from-scratch clone would have disappeared. (Although, maybe not; perhaps the philosophical differences that drive Linux and the BSDs in different directions would have eventually caused a from-scratch rewrite.)

        Ultimately I don't think either alternative would really have brought us out at much of a different place than we are right now, at least from an end-user's perspective; the majority of users don't really care about kernels as such anyway. But it's always fun to play 'what-if,' as long as one keeps in mind that although it's easy to fixate on how things could be better, it could always be far, far worse.

        [1] Great archive of Torvalds / Tanenbaum Usenet discussions here [fluidsignal.com]. There's so much ego going on there, from both sides, ASCII text can barely contain it...
        [2] I'm partial to fellow Slashdotter connorbd's BSD History [geocities.com], which is a good primer.

        • I think it's pretty clear that it's only the pace at which hardware has advanced in the last decade or so that has allowed Linux to continue monolithically.

          What'choo talking 'bout Willis? Over the past couple of years, Linux has been slowly evolving toward a hybrid kernel design. Between the common use of FUSE [sourceforge.net] for powerful new file systems and the recent merging of user space driver support [slashdot.org] into the kernel, Linux is showing more and more Microkernel attributes every day.

          In a sense, Tanenbaum wasn't really wrong. It's just that like most researchers, he was ahead of his time. Facets of Microkernel technology have made their way into nearly every major operating system on the market today. From Windows to Mac OS X to Linux, hybrid kernel design is proving to be a valuable feature that every moden operating system should have.

          When it comes down to it, microkernels just make sense. It's in many ways simpler to develop than a monolithic kernel, and provides an easy-to-implement yet powerful firewall between the computer's subsystems. The catch is that early reseach ran into performance problems inherent in task switching on every system call. Hybrid kernels attempt to minimize that by designing around the monolithic "kernel space" vs. "user space" division already present in most OSes. Because the division already exists, the performance hit can be quite minimal for certain forms of application. (I haven't kept track to know if such performance has actually been achieved in any Linux hybrid code, so take a grain of salt with this.) Pure device drivers would still have performance problems due to the data bubbling up from the kernel rather than executing entirely in kernel space. Thus hybrid features are more useful for subsystems that already interact with userspace. (e.g. A new filesystem.)

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by QuantumG ( 50515 )
            Performance isn't really the most important thing.

            Stability and security are the big wins. With the Linux kernel both these things are less of a problem than with other systems because it is expected that everything you run is open for inspection and improvement (and if you run stuff that isn't, well, you're on your own). But now we have this other option. If you don't trust a driver, you should be able to run it in user space. If it crashes, well, restart it, no harm done (hopefully).. and you don't ha

            • Performance isn't really the most important thing.

              It's important in that performance was what killed the Microkernel. After Mach came up with such pitiful performance numbers, all the OS developers* who had been looking to embrace microkernel architecture ran the other way. At the time, the performance vs. security/stablity tradeoffs weren't worth it. Now with ultra-modern machines running on an insecure internet, things are *starting* to turn around. :-)

              * There were a few exceptions, of course. NeXT adopted Mach regardless of the performance issues. They spent a lot of time upgrading it into the hybrid XNU kernal. QNX was a microkernel because the guys who wrote it were very clever and didn't know any better. NT shows the basic design concepts behind a microkernel, but all the servers ended up getting shoved into kernel space for performance. So NT just barely scrapes by as a hybrid.

              • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                by QuantumG ( 50515 )
                Yes, yes. Thank you for the history lesson.

                In the case of the Linux kernel, what I said is what it is good for.
                • My point is that performance has been a hot-button issue against microkernel design. That's why it has taken so long to realize the stability and security advantages of a hybrid kernel. If microkernels didn't have such a bad rep, Linux would have been hybridized as much as a decade ago. :-)
              • Actually performance is not what killed the microkernel. I've actually read some of the original detailed performance studies (ie 200+ page reports) on Mach and it simply was not the case that is was much slower than monolithic kernels. Not enough to make a substantial difference.

                The actual problem was the concept of the microkernel itself. When you protect servers from each other you add another layer of complexity to the interaction, and this is good in theory but in practice it gets in the kernel hack
        • It seems to me that had "real UNIX" been available for low-end systems in the early 90s

          Amiga Unix was available in 1990, a time when Amigas were still selling well. Despite being one of the better Unixes of the time, it didn't set the marketplace alight.

          • And Xenix, for 386 machines, sold by (of all people) Microsoft. The important thing is that they weren't free.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Thag ( 8436 )
            Did Amiga Unix support the multimedia end of things? Could you run the Video Toaster off it?

            If not, it sounds like a square peg in a round hole type situation, as the Amiga's real niche was in multimedia.

            Jon Acheson
        • I was a Unix user in the early 90's and following the 386BSD saga closely. It was much more well known among the Unix community, but no one was getting it to work. The home unix of choice is one that almost never gets mentioned Coherent [wikipedia.org], and business Unix was Xenix and later SCO. The Linux community had a focus on working with existing hardware and a focus on being usable by non Unix people since the days of the Corsair project [wikipedia.org].

          The idea that the 9 months made the difference is simple BS. Much as the Fre
        • It's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on, and only a very small body of users can be expected to ever compile their own

          You don't need to recompile anything to use a monolitic kernel. Also, a microkernel is not neccesarily able to add features without recompiling.

          When are microkernel zealots going to get that modularity is NOT EXCLUSIVE TO MICROKERNELS? Sight....modularity is a property of software, be i
        • it's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on
          be carefull with your definition of monolithic.

          linux is monolithic in the sense that everything that is part of the kernel runs in the same address space and has access to everything else in the kernel. However it has a module system allowing kernel code to be loaded and unloaded (though unloading is unusual) at the request of users, applications or hardware detec

        • if Moore's Law ever does start to level off, then I think we're going to see a move away from monolithic designs for good. It's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on

          What?

          Are you aware that you're not making any sense at all? You throw around a bunch of terms which may seem to you to form a logical chain of thought but they really do not. The underlying assumptions that more features in the kernel somehow bloat it significantly, that Moore's law has anything to do with memory, that the kernel is monolithic in any way that is relevant to what you're saying, etc. are blatantly wrong.

          Can you clarify what you're saying?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bcmm ( 768152 )
        In what way is Linux like a microkernel? A true microkernel puts a lot more than just device drivers in userspace.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        More ironic: the Linux kernel is slowly becoming a hybrid monolithic/micro-kernel.

        Reminads me a lot of the CISC/RISC war... CISC won ny adopting the good parts from RISC. Linux has userspace parts where it's useful, kernel parts where it's necessary. It's not simple, not elegant, not ideologically "correct". It's ugly and it works, just like most other real software.

    • Still in development (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jesterzog ( 189797 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:42PM (#20097055) Journal

      At least, it looks as if the Change Log [gnu.org] is still being updated. (Click the link titled "ChangeLog in the main directory".)

      • Debian (Score:3, Informative)

        by Verte ( 1053342 )
        Thanks, I was going to say something similar. The Hurd doesn't have developers coming out of its ears like Linux does, but if you want to run it on your x86 machine, Debian have a distribution [debian.org] of it that works today.

    • Re:15 years later... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:46PM (#20097077) Journal

      and the Hurd is still just around the corner. :(

      Yes, but will they port Duke Nukem' Forever to it?

      /P

      • Re:15 years later... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:01AM (#20097195)
        (this is the GPP)

        Great comment. Yeah, the Hurd and DNF basically had the same problem: they were great big-picture ideas, but actually implementing them turned into giant software development nightmares. In the Hurd's case, the main problem was that the GNU folks decided to base it on Mach. Then when Mach turned out to have major architectural problems, they moved on to L4. Progress on porting to L4 went slowly. But then, even that tack fell through as well, and so they became basically stuck as they are now. They're looking into several different microkernel bases - I think the one they're looking at now is called ?Coyote? Anyway, both DNF and the Hurd are sad tales of where concept doth not meet reality, and never the twain shall meet.

        We're drifting _way_ off-topic. Let's remember Linux now, the major kernel that started out as a hack. It still is, somewhat, (in terms of the way it's sort of in between Windows and the concept of the Hurd) but it's now one of the biggest server OSes on the planet.

        I shut up now.

      • Re:15 years later... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Gazzonyx ( 982402 ) <scott.lovenberg@gm a i l.com> on Friday August 03, 2007 @08:03AM (#20099385)

        and the Hurd is still just around the corner. :(

        Yes, but will they port Duke Nukem' Forever to it?

        /P

        Well, no... but it will kind of work under Wine-0.99.937.2777 on 3 or 4 AGP cards if you don't mind getting under the hood and, well... find a Slackware or Gentoo user.

        *Ducks*

    • Re:15 years later... (Score:5, Funny)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:57PM (#20097151) Homepage Journal
      I made this post [slashdot.org] three years ago as a gag. The scary part is that it's still as relevant today as it was then...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Trogre ( 513942 )
        Gee, funny how your sig hasn't changed in 3 years either :)

        (I know, I know, slashcode is broken)

        • It's a feature, not a bug!

          (No really, it is. Just like hard drive fragmentation was originally a feature. Funny how such features have ways of biting us in the posterior, eh?)
      • I almost missed the joke because I skipped everything after I recognized the first sentence. I've actually been watching the show from start to finish, as I got it on DVD from a friend that was shipping out for Iraq. After about 3 hours, my laptop's processor overheats and can't take it anymore, but that's neither here nor there.

        The one thing I can't help but notice is how primitive some of the CGI is. Granted, they went with prosthetics for all but the most extreme things, which certainly helped, and th
    • I'm curious about what's going on w.r.t. Hurd dev, but not curious enough to actually delve through the changelogs. Anybody involved care to summarize what's up?

      More importantly, is there still a point to its development? I'm no kernel hacker, but I'm sure there are things that the current kernel can't do well.

      Thanks.
      • It works. You can run X on it, the problem right now is a lack of drivers.

        But if you have qemu, you can certainly get it up and running from the K14 CD ISOs from Debian very quickly.
    • and the Hurd is still just around the corner. :(

      Didn't you hear? They are timing the release of the Hurd to coincide with that of Duke Nukem Forever. They'll both be 'ready' sometime in early 2024.

    • Re:15 years later... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by byolinux ( 535260 ) * on Friday August 03, 2007 @09:14AM (#20099995) Journal
      It runs X. I was using GNU yesterday, browsing the web, wrote some email, sent some email, IRC, SSH...

      What more do you need?

      • It runs X. I was using GNU yesterday, browsing the web, wrote some email, sent some email, IRC, SSH...
        Oh really? What do you call that? GNU/GNU?
        • No, GNU. Like I said.

          GNU/Linux being GNU with a different kernel. GNU is GNU with the GNU kernel, Hurd.
    • One of my friends was running a Debian Hurd (instead of Debian Linux) system for a while, so the Hurd is obviously usable these days.

  • Great name (Score:4, Funny)

    by Joebert ( 946227 ) on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:24PM (#20096929) Homepage

    Linus "finger me for more info" Torvalds


    Too bad his middle name isn't Connie.

  • Preservation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew@NOsPAM.gmail.com> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:37PM (#20097031) Homepage Journal
    I'm glad simply for the sake of history and preservation they're making these articles. I read the LKML frequently even if I don't fully understand the mechanics for the how and why the kernel operate, but I like to pretend that I do. I find this stuff rather fascinating. It is also interesting to wonder how Linux became what it is today considering its roots.

    Linux today is a child of countless contributers, but it is still tied in name and perception very much to one man. I wonder if people think this is a good thing. I've often maintained that Linus is terse, but I've enjoyed that about him. If he rips into someone, I chuckle. But after this latest fiasco with Con and the schedulers, I'm wondering if this is a bad thing.

    • terse? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:59PM (#20097179) Homepage Journal
      that's an understatement [gmane.org] :)

      In other words, I'm right. I'm always right, but sometimes I'm more right
      than other times. And dammit, when I say "files don't matter", I'm really
      really Right(tm).
      Which is actually more funny than arrogant, so long as you know Linus' style.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msimm ( 580077 )
        Good quote (and comment). Linus is truly funny. Possibly a perfect character to be in such an odd position. He never fails to bring some common sense, levity and even a little humility. My hats been off to him for years (and yes, I did read the biography). (:
  • I'm looking forward to any comments you might have

    Streak of natural leadership, much? Sure beats ducking flying chairs.

    Thankyou Linus!

  • Point update? (Score:3, Funny)

    by thatskinnyguy ( 1129515 ) on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:05AM (#20097225)
    I can see he's gotten a little bit better at letting people adjust to the new Kernel point updates.

  • Great quote by Linus (Score:5, Interesting)

    by schmiddy ( 599730 ) on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:05AM (#20097233) Homepage Journal
    I really enjoyed seeing the quote by Linus (this is a program for hackers by a hacker). He clearly never, ever, expected his little hobby project to catch on the way it did. Hope this gives hope and inspiration to all the OSS developers out there, scratching their own itches. Just looking back on the history of the software industry, it seems like so many tremendous ideas and businesses got started around a small hobby project by one or two smart guys: Google, Perl, Python, Linux, GNU, and so on. Remember that one man change history.

    • Re:Great quote by Linus (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Friday August 03, 2007 @02:32AM (#20097965) Homepage
      I've been reading "The Myth of Innovations" and "Black Swan". They're two books on different subjects but with a similar underlying theme: there's a great deal more randomness and unpredictability in this world than we like to admit. Things don't progress in a linear fashion but usually in parallel and in the form of a tree. Only in hindsight does it look linear because all the other branches have died out and been eliminated. This quote by Linus really illustrates this point. At that time, no one really knew what was going to happen to Linux. It could have gone in a million directions (forking in computer science terms).

      I think of the great advantages the OSS model has over closed source is that when these branches die out their work and whatever grain of usefulness/truth don't die with them. It's precisely the ability to fork and create another branch that allows OSS to really evolve and try out all the million possibilities. With closed source and an overly strict copyright scheme the overhead of trying those possibilities are too expensive. (regurgitating Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of the Network" here)

  • Source... (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Friday August 03, 2007 @01:01AM (#20097543) Homepage Journal
    So where is the link to the source for these?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by maubp ( 303462 )
      According to the article, there are no known copies of Linux 0.02 and 0.03, probably because Linus deleted his when they were superceded. If you know of anyone else with a copy do let him know!

      Its a shame, but at the time this was "little hack" project for him so full version control would have been overkill.

  • A post by Bill Gates (Score:5, Funny)

    by kbob88 ( 951258 ) on Friday August 03, 2007 @02:17AM (#20097905)
    Ran across this old post from some of my newsgroup archives:

    From: William Gates [email blocked]
    Subject: Costly kernel for IBM PC
    Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm
    Date: 5 Oct 81 05:41:06 GMT

    William Henry Gates III

    Do you pine for the nice days of CP/M-1.1, when men were men and wrote
    their own device drivers? Do you have too much money in your pocket? Are
    you much too free to do what you want with your computer? Are you
    finding it frustrating when everything works on CP/M? No more rebooting your
    computer every 10 minutes? Then this post might be just
    for you :-)

    As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I've purchased a version of QDOS for a song
    and I'm busy cocking it up and I'm going to sell it to IBM (suckers) for their
    new PC. It has finally reached the stage where it's completely unstable and
    most of the cooler things in CP/M have been removed.
    I am willing to put out the binaries, for a price, for wider distribution. It is
    just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I've successfully
    run BASIC/lunar-lander/COMMAND.COM etc under it (oh boy!).

    Sources for this pet project of mine are all mine mine mine! Unless you talk
    to Tim Paterson from SCP. Full kernel source is most definitely not provided, as
    I have swiped a lot of code from CP/M and QDOS, and anywhere else I could find it.
    The system is able to compile "as-is" on alternating Tuesdays and when the moon is
    full or on a spring tide, and has been known to work. At least once. Heh.
    Sources are locked away in my underground lair, I mean a shack I just bought in a
    small town in Washington called Redmond.

    I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". The Amiga will be
    out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got
    CP/M and the Apple ][. Well, this is a program for business people by a businessman.
    It's been real work and I expect to get paid for it!
    Plus hackers and students can't really create anything worthwhile.
    I'm going to hire really smart kids who don't know jack about computers
    and give them a lot of stock options. It won't matter if they create shit.
    We'll market the crap out of this thing! Once I get the hardware vendors to bundle it,
    we're golden! It is the beginning of my plan to dominate the world!
    Muwhahahaha! If you have any comments, please direct them to the guy
    over there holding the chair in a threatening manner.

    I'm also interested in hearing from anybody who has written any of the
    utilities/library functions for CP/M. I'd like to steal them, I mean embrace/extend/extinguish,
    I mean purchase them for a song, so I can add them to the system. If you
    send it me, it becomes mine! And I'll patent it! Drop me
    a line if you are willing to let me use your code.

                                    Bill

    PS. to STEVE BALLMER! I'm unable to get through to you, and keep getting
    "forward error - hermanmiller unknown domain" or something. I think I've got
    a job for you.

    PPS. to the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto -- I'm going to bury you guys!
    • Thanks, IMHO that's a +10 for funny.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rk ( 6314 )

      Very well done, but you're missing just one thing: In 1981 the comp.* hierarchy didn't exist on Usenet. For your amusement: The Great Renaming [wikipedia.org], which didn't occur until 1987.

      Wow, it just hit me that was 20 years ago. I suddenly feel very old.

  • OK, be honest... how many of you tried it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by iroll ( 717924 ) on Friday August 03, 2007 @03:07AM (#20098133) Homepage
    You can mail me for more info. "finger torvalds at kruuna.helsinki.fi"
    might tell you something too.

    computer:~ iroll$ finger torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi
    [kruuna.helsinki.fi]
      [Your machine computer.ph.ph.cox.net does not run identd]
    [(retval = -1, errno = 145). Please ask your manager to set it up.]
    Login name: torvalds In real life: Linus Torvalds
    Directory: /h/9/tkol/torvalds Shell: /bin/tcsh
    Never logged in.
    Mail last read Sat Feb 1 15:12:10 2003
    No Plan.
     
    Login name: Xtorvald In real life: Linus Benedict Torvalds
    Directory: /h/3/tkol/torvalds Shell: /bin/tcsh
    Never logged in.
    No unread mail
    No Plan.
    computer:~ iroll$
    All it tells me is that he hasn't checked his email in 4 and a half years :P

  • Simple reason, it's easy that way to understand what the original author was thinking, how he was developing it and where certain parts of the code come from. When you get dumped on a large project (and the Linux Kernel undoubtedly is one), it usually takes a LONG time to get into it, see past the various layers of changes and realize just why certain parts are the way they are.

    The reason for this is that when a few megabytes of code hit you without warning or roadmap, most people have no chance to see the
  • As i read all these articles on the net and from slashdot that compare Linux to Windows in such a way that Linux's aim is to steal market share from Windows. I also read in forums all the time, "Linux needs the marketshare so that software publishes will release Games/Photoshop etc on Linux then it will destroy microsoft" and i always say, "The aim of Linux WAS NEVER destroy Microsoft Windows market share." I used to always quote GNU from their site that said something like, "to create a completely open sou
    • Troll much ?

      I'll bite.

      It's all how you look at it. Linus began the kernel for the purpose of creating a free unix-like operating system for the 386. In other words he wanted "unix for his desktop". Of course it started out as a hacker project, but what open source software doesn't ?

      Linus also said in recent days (when responding to Con's claims that big money was coming in to push server development and thus taking away focus from Linux on the desktop) something along the lines of [paraphrased]: "The idea t
  • Is it just me, or do most excellent pieces of software begin their lives as "yeah, I know there are all these other alternatives that do exactly the same thing, but I swear I'm not totally reinventing the wheel here...?"
    • Actually, I think you are mistaken. IMHO, most excellent pieces of software begin their lives as "yeah, I know there's other solutions out there that do this, but they don't really solve my problem, or solve it the way I like, so here's my attempt at it..." I know most of my software projects have started off that way. You begin with a need (a cheap/free Unix-like OS, a decent raster graphics editor, a scripting language to solve another problem), and things evolve from there.

      'course, this is also why a
  • Man, I'm so glad this article got posted. It led to comments about Coherent [wikipedia.org], so now I can maybe put Linux on my Compaq Portable III. [oldcomputers.net]

    Will that increase my geek cred?

  • I've enjoyed [sic] doing it,


    Can anyone tell me why there is a "[sic]" in that above quote? There don't seem to be any spelling/grammatical mistakes in the sentence.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bytesex ( 112972 )

      I've enjoyed [sic] doing it,


      Can anyone tell me why there is a "[sic]" in that above quote? There don't seem to be any spelling/grammatical mistakes in the sentence.
      It was 'enjouyed' or something, originally.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by natpoor ( 142801 )
        I was wondering the same thing. However, "[sic]" is only used when the error was still there -- if you correct the error, you don't need "sic" since there is no error, although you'd need to note that you changed part of the quote, so like this: "I've [enjoyed] doing it." However, I believe there is some dispute as to corrections and changing different forms of spelling (such as with different dialects of the same language, like American and British English).

        Given all the it's/its errors in Slashdot, this i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bperkins ( 12056 )
      It's because slashdot stories can't even misspell things correctly.
  • If it wasn't for Linus, i would have continued on my path of a minix-like OS for my AtariST. ( no, not MiNT, but it was rather similar )

    But noooo. because of him i jumped ship to the i386 and lost interest in the 68xxxx.

    Could have been MY name up in lights.. thanks a bunch!
  • Could someone please tell me why there is a "[sic]" immediately after "enjoyed" in the quote? There is nothing wrong with the word "enjoyed" as far as I know. Does the editor think that it is "enjoied" or "enjoyd" instead*interrobang*.

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