From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: steve jenkin <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au>
Cc: TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: [OT?] 1993 'Sourceware' paper anniversary. What was right & any surprises?
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2022 14:16:48 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20221109221648.GS6203@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <C84CDF4C-28C5-41F3-B144-8CA02B8C8E00@canb.auug.org.au>
On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 09:01:42AM +1100, steve jenkin wrote:
> I???ve only recently stumbled across this paper.
>
> It gives the answer to one question I???ve had:
>
> Why did Linux become more popular than everything that came before it?
Yeah, that was a difficult time. My boss, Ken Okin (SVP of all server
hardware) didn't like the switch from SunOS to SVR4 any more than I did.
He paid me to go argue with the execs for 6 months. That paper was
the result.
It obviously went nowhere and Linux won. Big surprise.
The one thing I learned in that 6 months was respect for the execs.
As an engineer, I had the luxury of taking the time to solve a problem and
know that I solved it correctly. The execs didn't have that. They had
to make decisions essentially with their gut, they couldn't afford the
time to figure out the right answer, they had to come up with the right
answer on the fly. I don't think I could do that.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-11-09 22:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-11-09 22:01 [TUHS] " steve jenkin
2022-11-09 22:16 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2022-11-09 22:24 ` [TUHS] " Clem Cole
2022-11-09 22:51 ` Joseph Holsten
2022-11-10 0:47 ` segaloco via TUHS
2022-11-10 0:54 ` Joseph Holsten
2022-11-10 1:28 ` David Arnold
2022-11-10 6:14 ` Theodore Ts'o
2022-11-10 9:12 ` David Arnold
2022-11-10 13:27 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2022-11-10 15:33 ` Clem Cole
2022-11-10 1:42 ` Larry McVoy
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