2 Sep
2012
2 Sep
'12
6:10 p.m.
On 02/09/12 5:31 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
...
Most highly technical organizations (or organizations with competent
technical staffs) had their own "standard OS load" for a given platform,
that consisted of a commercial vendor-supplied UNIX (SunOS, Ultrix, etc)
with all the bad stuff fixed. Fixing stuff usually meant replacing
"tar", "awk", etc with stuff that had actually progressed since the
1970s...and it was almost always GNU. Further, you had source code, so
you could fix any bugs you ran into without having to deal with talking
to incompetent vendor employees and MAYBE getting a bug fix in a few months.
Tell the kids these days - they won't believe yer.
Seriously: the great Reddit horde has no idea how bad things were before
GNU shook it up. It was hard to dream in 1985 that gcc would supplant
just about every vendor compiler, and when RMS said he hoped this would
happen, many said he was nuts (we have Usenet archives to prove it).
But it did eventually happen. :)
--Toby
-Dave