16 Jan
1999
16 Jan
'99
12:17 p.m.
On Sat, 16 Jan 1999, Chuck McManis wrote:
Linus Torvalds wanted UNIX on his PC, he didn't
want to pay for it, he got
a copy of MINIX (part of Tannenbaum(sp?)'s operating systems fundamentals
course) and ported it to his hardware. He thought it sucked. He began
improving it, he and Tannenbaum got into many flame wars on the net, Linus
kept releasing his work in progress, other people started contributing,
eventually something usable was available, a long while later something
stable was available.
I only remember one flame war, but I also remember Linus writing a kernel
to learn about the 386 -- it was an intellectual exercise as much as
anything. I recall an effort to create a 286 protected mode version of
Minix (mostly by Bruce Somebody in Oz) before Linus' effort was underway,
so it's not like there were no alternatives at the time. It's not at all
clear that Linus would have taken up a different hobby even if the BSD
sources had been released when Berkeley freed them up.
I was running Minix, Microport AT, and ISC's 386 Unix on my PCs during
those days, and they were pretty nice and not very expensive (I think I
managed to get a good deal pretending to be a reseller or something).
Later, I remember UnixWare getting pretty cheap as well.
When Linux stabilized, it was simply cheaper, better, smaller, and faster
than anything available, and remains so today. It's great that FreeBSD
exists, and I preferred it for a while because it was more familiar and
had better networking support for a couple of months, but I'd never go
back.
Now that the world has a nice OS, it'd be cool if somebody would write a
nice GUI. If Linus found Minix boneheaded, there's got to be a thousand
guys with talent and lots of free time that see X's holes.
-- Doug