From: Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com>
To: Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org>
Cc: The Eunuchs Historic Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2020 13:23:35 +1300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CACNPpebCzXGHgtBcCUuNFt_1yVzviTWDA98kfeS5NwQ5ghg3+g@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <C7972CAB-7A91-49CD-9F7A-9675400E81E5@alchemistowl.org>
There's a book called "Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental
Revolutionary" co-authored by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond that
sets out how he came to write the Linux kernel.
Wesley Parish
On 1/18/20, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote:
> [I originally asked the following on Twitter which was probably not the
> smartest idea]
>
> I was recently wondering about the origins of Linux, i.e. Linux Torvalds
> doing his MSc and deciding to write Linux (the kernel) for the i386 because
> Minix did not support the i386 properly. While this is perfectly
> understandable I was trying to understand why, as he was in academia, he did
> not decide to write a “free X” for a different X. The example I picked was
> Plan 9, simply because I always liked it but X could be any number of other
> operating systems which he would have been exposed to in academia. This all
> started in my mind because I was thinking about my friends who were CompSci
> university students with me at the time and they were into all sorts of
> esoteric stuff like Miranda-based operating systems, building a complete
> interface builder for X11 on SunOS including sparkly mouse pointers, etc. (I
> guess you could define it as “the usual frivolous MSc projects”) and
> comparing their choices with Linus’.
>
> The answers I got varied from “the world needed a free Unix and BSD was
> embroiled in the AT&T lawsuit at the time” to “Plan 9 also had a restrictive
> license” (to the latter my response was that “so did Unix and that’s why
> Linus built Linux!”) but I don’t feel any of the answers addressed my
> underlying question as to what was wrong in the exposure to other operating
> systems which made Unix the choice?
>
> Personally I feel that if we had a distributed OS now instead of Linux we’d
> be better off with the current architecture of the world so I am sad that
> "Linux is not Plan 9" which is what prompted the question.
>
> Obviously I am most grateful for being able to boot the Mathematics
> department’s MS-DOS i486 machines with Linux 0.12 floppy disks and not
> having to code Fortran 77 in Notepad followed by eventually taking over the
> department with X-Terminals based on Linux connected to the departmental
> servers (Sun, DEC Alpha, IBM RS/6000s). Without Linux they had been running
> eXeed (sp?) on Windows 3.11! In this respect Linux definitely filled in a
> huge gap.
>
> Arrigo
>
>
prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-01-18 0:24 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 ` [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question" Larry McVoy
2020-01-17 23:11 ` Andrew Warkentin
2020-01-17 23:20 ` Rob Pike
2020-01-17 23:38 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-18 0:23 ` Wesley Parish [this message]
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