From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: The Eunuchs Historic Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2020 07:30:00 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200118153000.GC28686@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200118035051.GC481935@mit.edu>
On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 10:50:51PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
+1 to everything Ted said, that's how I remember it as well. I knew
about both Linux and 386BSD and while 386BSD felt very familiar to
a SunOS guy, there was something special about Linux. For a while I
played with both, 386BSD was sort of better in that it had networking,
but like Ted, my network was a modem and TCP over a modem wasn't pleasant.
So Linux won out and eventually networked just fine.
> At the time when Linus announced his creation (not yet named) on
> comp.os.minix in August 1991, it was already self-hosting. And that
> happened pretty quickly; he first started working on the project in
> June or July.
>
> Around the end of 1991, I had added Job Control (implemented from
> POSIX.1 as a the specification), so we could put jobs in the
> background. In 1992 X Windows was ported to Linux. Networking
> support followed shortly thereafter.
>
> > So all in all.. As I remember it, there was never really a decision to 'make
> > this great new OS!'.. It kinda happened with right place, right time, right
> > people, etc.
>
> In the super-early days (late 1991, early 1992), those of us who
> worked on it just wanted a "something Unix-like" that we could run at
> home (my first computer was a 40 MHz 386 with 16 MB of memory). This
> was before the AT&T/BSD Lawsuit (which was in 1992) and while Jolitz
> may have been demonstrating 386BSD in private, I was certainly never
> aware of it --- and Linus was publishing new versions every few days
> on an ftp site. We'd send patches, and in less than a week, there'd
> be a new release dropped that we could download.
>
> So the argument, "Linus would have never started on Linux if itT
> weren't for the AT&T Lawsuit" I don't think fits with the timeline.
> Development was very fast paced, and so it was *fun*. And at least
> for me, the lacking of networking during the early days didn't bother
> me much, since I didn't have networking at home. (I didn't have
> grounded outlets, either, in my 3 people for $1050/month apartment.
> Each leg was 50-60V to ground, and the wiring was cloth wrapped, and
> was either steel or aluminum; I never did figured out which....)
> Using zmodem over a 2400 bps modem was way more efficient than PPP, so
> even once we had networking, I didn't always bring up pppd. And the
> most common way I would download source was using set of 1.44 MB
> floppies and a station wagon (literally; I was driving a Corolla wagon).
>
> During those early days, the fact that Linux was more "primitive" than
> BSD may have been an advantage, since it sources was small, and
> release engineering is simple when you only support one architecture.
>
> The other things I noticed was that because we didn't have the weight
> of the Unix/BSD legacy, we were more free to experiment. Bruce Evans
> was working on the serial driver for FreeBSD, and I was working on the
> serial driver for Linux, and we had a friendly competition to see who
> could get better throughput using the very primitive 8250 and later
> 16550 UART. The figure of merit we were using was the CPU overhead of
> a C-Kermit file transfer over two RS-232 ports connected via a
> loopback cable. We'd compare notes to see how we could make things
> better, me for Linux, and Bruce for FreeBSD, and it was *fun*.
> Eventually, it got to the point where I was making changes to the tty
> layer to further optimize things, and at that point Bruce reported
> that he couldn't do some of the optimizations, since it would have
> required changing the TTY layer that had been handed down from the
> Gods of Olympus^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H BSD and so it was nixed by his
> colleagues in FreeBSD land.
>
> In contrast, in Linux, people felt free to rip out and replace code if
> it would make things better. Depending on how you count things, the
> networking layer in Linux was ripped out and replaced three or four
> times in the space of as many years. Sure, the first version was
> pretty crappy, and was barely good enough for simple telnet
> connections. But things got better fast, because people were felt
> free to experiment.
>
> My personal belief is that it was this development velocity and
> freedom to experiment starting with a super simple base is what caused
> Linux to become very popular amongst the those who just wanted to play
> with kernel development. Compare and contrast Linus's willingness to
> accept patches from others and his turnaround time to get those
> patches into new releases with Bill Jolitz's 386BSD effort --- and I
> don't think you need the AT&T lawsuit to explain why Linux took off in
> 1991-1992. FreeBSD and NetBSD was started in 1993 because of the
> failure of Jolitz to accept patches in a timely fashion.
>
> - Ted
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-01-18 15:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 49+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-01-17 16:01 Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 16:53 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-17 17:08 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 17:25 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-17 19:59 ` Arno Griffioen
2020-01-18 3:50 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-18 4:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-18 15:25 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-18 16:19 ` reed
2020-01-19 2:49 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 3:12 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:47 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Warren Toomey
2020-01-19 3:51 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 13:25 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 13:48 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 3:32 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-20 3:51 ` George Michaelson
2020-01-20 3:59 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Jon Forrest
2020-01-20 17:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 17:49 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-20 19:00 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 18:04 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-20 18:09 ` David Barto
2020-01-20 18:34 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Arthur Krewat
2020-01-20 19:18 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 19:46 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-20 20:15 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 6:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Lars Brinkhoff
2020-01-21 14:30 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 17:17 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 17:22 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 17:25 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 18:43 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 18:44 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 19:14 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 20:27 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-22 0:14 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg A. Woods
2020-01-21 0:44 ` Bakul Shah
2020-01-20 19:09 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-20 19:51 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 23:04 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-21 0:13 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 23:45 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-18 15:30 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2020-01-17 23:11 ` [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question" Andrew Warkentin
2020-01-17 23:20 ` Rob Pike
2020-01-17 23:38 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-18 0:23 ` Wesley Parish
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20200118153000.GC28686@mcvoy.com \
--to=lm@mcvoy.com \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
--cc=tytso@mit.edu \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).