
Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011) - adamnemecek
http://liw.fi/linux20/
======
pawadu
_> I told Linus about rn, and he liked it too. We both spent way too much time
reading newsgroups. Neither of us posted anything that year, though. There
were big warnings against wasting other people's time, and we took them to
heart._

Oh, the good old days. And yes, I see the irony.

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zeveb
It's cool that Linux started as a terminal emulator so that Linux could read
Usenet from home: a terminal emulator and modem interface were within the
grasp of a bright college student in the mid-90s.

What worries me is that the necessary software stack to do anything interest
today is so heavyweight that we'll never see another great hobbyist OS. You
don't just have to support WiFi and/or Ethernet, IPv6 and/or IPv4, TCP, parse
HTML & display HTML (that's all doable, more-or-less, by someone bright and
willing to compromise): you have to have graphics, you need a DOM, you need
JavaScript, you need all the fiddly browser APIs, you need CSS — because the
MVP for a web terminal is _everything_.

The MVP for an old fashioned terminal was 'read & write to modem, display text
on screen.' You could cheat and not even offer paging at first!

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I dunno if that's true. There's plenty of projects doing baremetal onto
Raspberry Pi or other ARM SoC boards... stuff I've personally put together
started to venture into OS territory. Once you have POSIX, porting existing
software isn't that bad.

And there are web browsers like NetSurf that can run on very simple or strange
or stripped down systems. I've seen NetSurf running on one of my 8mhz mc68000
Atari ST systems.

~~~
zeveb
> Once you have POSIX, porting existing software isn't that bad.

Yeah, but the really exciting stuff won't be POSIX. I definitely don't think
it'll run C (well, of course someone will eventually port a C compiler to it,
but the performance might not be great).

I think a really exciting new OS would try to do something radically
different, not just reimplement what's been done before (which, to be fair, is
what Linux does and why Linux is successful: if Linus had implemented Plan 9
instead we'd never have heard of him).

FWIW, NetSurf definitely sounds interesting, but a) it's still written in C
and b) it doesn't appear to support JavaScript in production yet. I personally
don't care, but all the hip kids these days keep on telling me that the only
way for someone to read an article online is to download & execute hundreds of
megabytes of obfuscated executable code of dubious origin.

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mdekkers
When introducing Linux with my enterprise customers at the time, the chorus of
"are you insane", "this will never work", and "this will never last" was
deafening....

~~~
setq
Had the same. The technical director of the company I worked for was saying
that it was all going to be commercial windows and x86 in 2020. I said unix,
open source and ARM. I think we had a £20 bet on it.

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laumars
> "For a while, Linux did not quite do everything right with networking, so it
> was banned from the university network. That gave Linus a lot of motivation
> to fix it, of course"

Sounds like there's another interesting story there regarding why it got
banned. Anyone any wiser?

~~~
kgabis
Most likely it was doing something naughty in it's network stack.

~~~
laumars
I had worked that much out for myself. What with it being explicitly stated in
the quote that the network stack wasn't working correctly and had to be fixed.
:P

The bit I was interested in was what was Linux doing wrong and how was the
fault detected? Did it take anything else down with it? Was the fix something
straightforward (ie it was a silly oversight that caused the problem) or
something complicated?

It can be interesting to read stories about tech going wrong. Sometimes
because the results can be amusing in retrospect (less so at the time of the
problem) and sometimes because it's just nice to read that problems and
mistakes can happen to other people too.

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mwcampbell
The article is far more interesting than the disclaimer at the beginning
suggests. BTW, I had it read to be by a speech synthesizer at sort of high
speed while fully conscious.

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iamtew
Maybe add an (2013) to the post title.

