Jfc im older than Linux
Me too man, but not by much
I for one really appreciate the effort of supporting non-AT drives despite the initial skepticism.
I’m glad someone was able to donate a non-AT drive because Linus could not afford it :-(
I’m OOTL, what’s the backstory here?
Linux
What was minix then? A non FOSS version?
A microkernel teaching OS by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
In 2017 the world (including Tanenbaum) found out that the Intel Management Engine uses Minix internally. Intel just kind of did that silently. So Minix is still around.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10754
MINIX originally was developed in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as a teaching tool for his textbook Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Today, it is a text-oriented operating system with a kernel of less than 6,000 lines of code. MINIX’s largest claim to fame is as an example of a microkernel, in which each device driver runs as an isolated user-mode process—a structure that not only increases security but also reliability, because it means a bug in a driver cannot bring down the entire system.
In its heyday during the early 1990s, MINIX was popular among hobbyists and developers because of its inexpensive proprietary license. However, by the time it was licensed under a BSD-style license in 2000, MINIX had been overshadowed by other free-licensed operating systems.
Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history. It inspired Linus Torvalds to develop Linux, and some of his early work was written on MINIX. Probably too, Torvalds’ early decision to support the MINIX filesystem is responsible for the Linux kernel’s support of almost every filesystem imaginable.
Later, Torvalds and Tanenbaum had a frank e-mail debate about the relative merits of macrokernels and microkernels. This early history resurfaced in 2004 when Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution prepared a book alleging that Torvalds borrowed code from MINIX—a charge that Tanenbaum, among others, so comprehensively debunked, and the book was never actually published (see Resources).
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate
What was minix then? A non FOSS version?
It wasn’t FOSS, but then neither was Linux originally.
That kind of depends on how you define FOSS. The way we think of that today was in very early stages back in the 1991 and the orignal source was distributed as free, both as in speech and as in beer, but commercial use was prohibited, so it doesn’t strictly speaking qualify as FOSS (like we understand it today). About a year later Linux was released under GPL and the rest is history.
Public domain code, academic world with any source code and things like that predate both Linux and GNU by a few decades and even the Free Software Foundation came 5-6 years before Linux, but the Linux itself has been pretty much as free as it is today from the start. GPL, GNU, FSF and all the things Stallman created or was a part of (regardless of his conflicting personality) just created a set of rules on how to play this game, pretty much before any game or rules for it existed.
Minix was a commercial thing from the start, Linux wasn’t, and things just refined on the way. You are of course correct that the first release of Linux wasn’t strictly speaking FOSS, but the whole ‘FOSS’ mentality and rules for it wasn’t really a thing either back then.
There’s of course adacemic debate to have for days on which came first and what rules whoever did obey and what release counts as FOSS or not, but for all intents and purposes, Linux was free software from the start and the competition was not.
I read a biography of Stallman several years ago. The whole free software movement was an attempt to preserve the early hacker culture where everybody freely swapped code. So, Stallman didn’t really “invent” FOSS; he just codified that early hacker ethos.
Agree with you up until “the competition was not”.
GNU HURD was competition for one thing.
More importantly, so was BSD. BSD predates Linux ( though its distribution specifically as FreeBSD does not ).
I’ve read Linus’s book several years ago, and based on that flimsy knowledge on back of my head, I don’t think Linus was really competing with anyone at the time. Hurd was around, but it’s still coming soon™ to widespread use and things with AT&T and BSD were “a bit” complex at the time.
BSD obviously has brought a ton of stuff on the table which Linux greatly benefited from and their stance on FOSS shouldn’t go without appreciation, but assuming my history knowledge isn’t too badly flawed, BSD and Linux weren’t straight competitors, but they started to gain traction (regardless of a lot longer history with BSD) around the same time and they grew stronger together instead of competing with eachother.
A ton of us owes our current corporate lifes to the people who built the stepping stones before us, and Linus is no different. Obviously I personally owe Linus a ton for enabling my current status at the office, but the whole thing wouldn’t been possible without people coming before him. RMS and GNU movement plays a big part of that, but equally big part is played by a ton of other people.
I’m not an expert by any stretch on history of Linux/Unix, but I’m glad that the people preceding my career did what they did. Covering all the bases on the topic would require a ton more than I can spit out on a platform like this, I’m just happy that we have the FOSS movement at all instead of everything being a walled garden today.
386BSD was not available until some months after Linux was released, so you had GNU with no working kernel and BSD not yet available on the hardware he had, hardware a lot of normal people had. I think the GPL also felt more philosophically right to many of them, and it limited how much they needed to re-do work that someone else had already done but kept secret.
The AT&T lawsuit definitely hampered BSD growth just as it was ported to the 386, but it was filed after Linux was already a thing.
Linux in the wild for the first time
Ahh man only ata?
it seems so innocent, lol
He was 22 years old. Pretty incredible.
If you except Google co-opting Linux to create the most terrible dystopian mobile surveillance platform ever to come this close to 1984, Microsoft co-opting it to pretend they like open-source and broaden the reach of their closed-source crap, and sonsabitches like Redhat, amazingly it mostly still is.
If you don’t like what they are doing with Linux, because it is free and open source, participate in people that are using it in ways that you do like that they do it, or do it yourself.
There is nothing stopping you
Uh, Android is the alternative to Apple’s iOS. Android is much more customizable.
Which is kinda sad in its own way.
Think Different™ (But in the exact same way)
Think Different™ (Because we deprecated the service you liked and depended on because an internal team was jockeying for a higher position and rewrote what you loved but worse, so actually you are thinking different every year!)
Azure don’t give a shit what it runs. Windows is on its own these days; if they succeed, good for them, but honestly I think the days of Microsoft just pretending to give a shit about Linux are long gone; it’s an important OS to them too.
I’ve worked for Microsoft for 12 years, still have lots of friends there so I get some of the vibe from that.
Friends don’t let friends use windows man. :p
That’s what he said
Putting Red hat in the same group as Google and Microsoft is wild.
That’s because Red hat recently started doing some Microsoft and Google like shit.
While Microsoft and Google merely pretend to like open source but transparently hate it, it is (was) not quite as obvious that red hat wanted to capture the enterprise Linux market wholesale. What red hat has done is terrible for the ecosystem, much more so than Microsoft just throwing out worthless tokens of appreciation.
You people are hilarious. Red Hat provides more GPL code than any company I can think of. Half of what people call GNU has Red Hat as the largest contributor.
Feels before reals.
It’s not that far fetched, Google used to have somehow the same philosophy as current IBM-RedHat.
That post changed my life, gave me a great hobby, which became a career, and still puts food on the table for me and my family to this day. Thank you, Linus.
There’s no guessing what will catch the world by storm. At a party once, Bram Cohen tried to get me interested in his ideas for a a peer-to-peer protocol, and I thought nothing of it.
My cousin’s buddies asked him to build the website for their new ride hailing app but he didn’t feel like doing some rinky dink thing, apparently Travis and them took it in stride though.
that’s all I have :-(
aww
We should make a donation campaign, pretty sure somebody has a spare SATA drive around. This minix clone sounds good
A few years ago there was a fantastic video detailing thorvald’s PC and it is a beast, crazy how far we’ve come
I remember him saying his gpu was “just some random rx580” which was a current GPU at the time.
Poor Linus :c
Just look at those nested parentheses. A true sign of (pedantic) greatness, when a person needs to clarify something in their earlier clarification.
Some of those parens could’ve been replaced with commas and retain their meaning (that’s what I do to avoid nesting, so that it doesn’t get confusing).
Wait until you need nested commas, those lists won’t delineate themselves!
You have command of English grammar, clearly.
How’s your Finnish?
Not as good as my other primary languages, I have to admit. Finnish has too many consonants for my taste.
Or he could have used brackets.
I’ve never seen that being used, but it seems it’s a thing in English. What if you wanna best deeper? Do you go {}? Then <>? «»?
Not really an English thing so much as a math thing that makes too much sense to not use elsewhere. For instance, in math you might have x[3 - 7{3y + (a * b)}]. I haven’t actually seen them go deeper than three sets, though, so I’m not sure what would be next.
at that point I start recycling them, and go back to parenthesis.
so when bp = 300x - 3, this:
4( 4[ 4{ 15bp + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000
would turn to
4( 4[ 4{ 15( 300x - 3) + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000
perhaps not the best, but I rather stick to conventional symbols rather than using… idk, question marks? that’d be funny as hell, though
just picture it:
4© 4« 4¿ 15bp + 10 ? - 375 » - 2250 🄯 - 15000
The amount of effort I do to try and avoid using double parentesis is trully herculean.
I think that stuff is the product of a completionist/perfectionist mindset - as one is writting, important details/context related to the main train of thought pop-up in one’s mind and as one is writting those, important details/context related to the other details/context pop-up in one’s mind (and the tendency is to keep going down the rabbit hole of details/context on details/context).
You get this very noticeably with people who during a conversation go out on a tangent and often even end up losing the train of thought of the main conversation (a tendecy I definitelly have) since one doesn’t get a chance to go back and re-read, reorganise and correct during a spoken conversation.
Personally I don’t think it’s an actual quality (sorry to all upvoters) as it indicates a disorganised mind. It is however the kind of thing one overcomes with experience and I bet Mr Torvalds himself is mostly beyond it by now.
I’ve had a teacher in elementary school scream at me for doing so. (Nesting parentheses is forbidden. [You are supposed to use brackets.])
It’s wild seeing square brackets for something other than array indexing.
I had a teacher that screamed at me for “taking the lords name in vain…” They’re definitely wrong from time-to-time ;-)
I had a science teacher that told us, “If you sneeze three times and nobody blesses you, the devil takes your soul!”
It’s science.
Pretty sure I read that paper a few years back ;-)
What did the teacher say about apostrophes to indicate possession?
I love it™ (The nested parentheses are one of the greatest tools known to mankind (And to all other creatures))
To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.
I always tell myself I am reading minds when I read inside parentheses
Who’s to say you’re not (I won’t, at the least)?
I have been stopping myself from using those and instead restructure my sentence. But if people like it, guess I can start keeping it.
I do find it more useful, however, to have a kind of a reference to the thing written at the end instead [1], but markdown doesn’t seem to have anything for that, and using the syntax for Markdown references, is only useful for hyperlinks, or if the reader is willing to read the hover text 2.
[1]: Like This. I would love it if the markdown viewer would link the above [1] to this line. Maybe with a scrolldown effect.
Eh, Lemmy Connect does not format it properly.
Neither does Voyager (Wefwef) :(
Checking in from Avelon 😉
And automatically numbered too! Nice.
Though for me, instead of a scrolldown effect, it reloads the page on clicking the link.Trying a second time, it does the scrolldown properly. Weird
But that’s just an implementation detail and as long as this is standard, I’ll just start using it.Thanks
People like these? I do em all the time but always feel I’m overexplaining.
I once did double “parentheses” in speech when started doing streaming year ago, lol.
I’m pretty sure the eventual conversion of every atom in the universe to computronium will run Linux.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
“Just a hobby, won’t be big” - he really didn’t think it will be one of the most sought after projects.
“We will be in and out, 10 minutes”
Or wanted to appear non-threatening
Truly humble beginnings.
Ehh, it’ll never take off.
Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.
33 years ago, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except … the desktop.
(I’m paraphrasing his quote – he said something like this years ago, can’t find it, though.)
I would argue that it does dominate the desktop now as well, just not by usage numbers.
If I was told I had to use a windows desktop these days at home I think I’d start investing in a very large book collection.
You have to use a Windows desktop at home.
Sincerely,
Barnes & Noble
Without a distro to rally behind I’m personally somewhat skeptical. Ubuntu was the best shot we had but since switching everything over to SNAPs it’s on the slow side. With the number of Windows ads and early end of support for Windows 10 there’s a real opportunity for desktop Linux, but until there’s a well supported distro that genuinely doesn’t require using the terminal I can’t see there being mass adoption.
Any distro that ships KDE/Plasma as its default desktop should do the trick. I’m not personally using it right now but I hear OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is kicking a lot of rear end lately.
When I used TW few years ago it kicked every ass too.
It’s not about the distro. Most distros out right now are pretty good. What you need is hardware that lots of people want to buy with Linux installed on it as the default choice. Normal people don’t want to install any OS, be it Linux, Windows, MacOS or BSD. Whatever comes by default, it’s good.
I’m pretty sure that right now the most popular Linux distros are ChromeOS and SteamOS. I wonder why
My grandmother ran Linux for a couple decades until her death at 101 years old. My 80+ year old mom has been running Linux for at least 2 decades. Yes, I’m tech support, but I don’t really have to do anything. It just works.
And I’m cracking up at the scammers phoning up my 85 year old father telling him his Windows has been compromised on his Linux desktop.
Removed by mod
You might be thinking of this:
https://youtu.be/ZPUk1yNVeEI?feature=shared
Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don’t really care what their computer is running as long as it works.
Well, I was thinking of a quote that was much more similar to what I wrote (and it’s not in the video you linked).
I had such a trouble finding it that I’m starting to feel like it might be one of those “quotes” where the credited author never really said that, but I haven’t completely given up :D
Here’s one closer to what I paraphrased (but not quite it)–quoting an article from cio.com
While Linux pretty much dominates almost every walk of our lives, even on the consumer devices like smartphones and smart TVs, it has not had the same success on the desktop. What does Torvalds think about it? Is Linux a failure on the desktop? Not really. “The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I’m known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”
