From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <13426df10703081355y3cc3f4a8h744ca056b9c9c26d@mail.gmail.com> Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 14:55:12 -0700 From: "ron minnich" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno In-Reply-To: <45F079ED.8070504@proweb.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <20070307084327.Y60404@orthanc.ca> <3e1162e60703071628q3c5e16deg22859ed62937505b@mail.gmail.com> <45EF5CB6.4040902@gmail.com> <45F079ED.8070504@proweb.co.uk> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1c8b8c64-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 3/8/07, matt wrote: > http://9fans.net/archive/2001/06/170 > > From: Lucio De Re > > Quake is to Linux what 1-2-3 was to the IBM Personal Computer. > Without it, I believe, Linux would still be as much of a curiosity as > Plan 9 is today. interesting perspective. A different one comes from my side. By 1993,at my job at the now-gone Supercomputing Research Center, we were already buying PCs to evaluate Linux and FreeBSD on PCs for clustering. I had been running 386bsd at that time almost since its release. And folks in DOE were doing the same kind of testing. Clusters had a long history -- almost 10 years -- by 1993; it's not that Linux or FreeBSD did anything new or better, in fact at the time they were considerably worse (in fact, most Linux cluster software is not an advance over what was routinely done in 1993); but you could fix them. By 1993 Sun and other companies had made it impossible to get OS source. The vendors, who owned the clustering space at the time, cut their own throats by refusing to release source. People voted with their feet. Sound familiar? :-) At the same time, the supercomputing space was 0% of all PC sales, so it's not like we mattered. Google and the banking sector have changed that somewhat. thanks ron