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Entertaining Bits From The Ancient Kernel Tree

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the but-ya-won't-find-him-on-comedy-central dept.

option8 writes "I have added a page of some of the miscellaneous comments that appear in the Linux Kernel, version 0.01 (ca. August, 1991). Linus turns out to be quite the jokester, leaving all kinds of non-sequiturs and irreverent one-liners in the code, many of which survive today in the latest developmental releases. I thought to archive these and share with those people who aren't the types who go diving through ten year (gasp!) old code for kicks. Enjoy."

6 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Slightly offtopic but... by seizer · · Score: 5

    Did anyone see that someone posted the incomplete source to COMMAND.COM way back?

    http://slashdot.org/co mments.pl?sid=00/06/08/0647212&cid=574.

    Have to love this bit:

    ; REV 1.50
    ; Some code for new 2.0 DOS, sort of HACKey. Not enough time to
    ; do it right.


    --Remove SPAM from my address to mail me

  2. Sort of eerie by Red+Moose · · Score: 5
    It's a bit eerie reading that (c) 1991 Linus Torvalds, almost a decade ago.

    Think about, Win32 didn't exist, and IBM didn't know MS were going to screw them over with OS/2. Amiga were fighting with Atari.

    The Gulf War was on...threats of bombing and the stealth plane made it's debut.

    Slashdot didn't exist. Heck, Tim Lee was thinking maybe Hypertext mught be a cool way to store his university notes, thus was born the web.

    Usenet didn't contain thousands of porn pictures, BBS systems were alive and well.

    Sort of wierd, that unknown to all the mainstream and even tech groups Linus + some people were working on the only OS that would ever threaten Microsoft.....that Microsoft would even *need* threatening.

    And still 10 years later, MacOS still is cludgy and can't multitask....I suppose some things just don't change.

    --

    Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better

  3. Re:What else do you all put into your code? by Nagash · · Score: 5

    I put this in an assignment for an Artificial Intelligence course. It was a Java applet that implemented the A-star search algorithm that we had to modify. The code was pure garbage, and the teaching assistant that marked it was also the one who picked it off the web in order for us to modify it. I was not amused. So, I stated my position in a rather forward manner...


    // what the hell is with this magic number crap?
    // /me slaps original programmer around with a hammer.

    ...

    // This is a butt ugly hack, but given the utterly shit
    // code that surrounds it, it should feel right at home.

    ...

    // I don't know why I had to set a number to tell me what
    // finishCell to use, but I did. I simply do not have the
    // time to wade my way through this crap program to figure it
    // out. I got better things to do, like pull my fingernails
    // out and then bathe my hand in lye.

    ...

    // I added this awful, awful hack. I am ashamed to have written code like this.

    I also wrote a letter to the prof and TA on behalf of the other multitudes of students who thought the same thing I did. Needless to say, I got a bad mark (didn't care anyway) and the TA hates me now. Turns out they really do read the comments! =)

    Woz

  4. this is a dumb comment i knew someone would make by Hollins · · Score: 5

    Why didn't you post Linus' entire comment?

    For those with more memory than 8 Mb - tough luck. I've
    * not got it, why should you :-) The source is here. Change
    * it. (Seriously - it shouldn't be too difficult. Mostly
    * change some constants etc. I left it at 8Mb, as my machine
    * even cannot be extended past that (ok, but it was cheap :-)
    * I've tried to show which constants to change by having
    * some kind of marker at them (search for "8Mb"), but I
    * won't guarantee that's all :-( )

    Bill Gates didn't include source code and encourage others to change it. He wasn't saying it in jest, and he was not referring to an Alpha release.

    All this making you the bigger idiot.

  5. Can Someone Answer This.... by Carnage4Life · · Score: 5

    from sched.c:

    /*
    * 'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There
    * probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well
    * in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc).

    Okay can anyone tell me how many times they have thought the exact same thing about their only for somebody else to suggest a scenario or even worse use it "improperly" and find a bug. I think I'm up to several dozen times... :-)


  6. I like this linux source comment by tap · · Score: 5

    It's from the driver for the cmd640 IDE chipset.

    * This file provides support for the advanced features and bugs
    * of IDE interfaces using the CMD Technologies 0640 IDE interface chip.
    *
    * These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
    * to work on every motherboard design that uses this screwed chip seems
    * bloody well impossible. However, we're still trying.