Linux Anecdotes

Doug Muth writes: "Earlier today, I came across an old document on Lars Wirzenius's website titled Linux Anecdotes, which tells about the side of Linux that we never knew. An excerpt: 'At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day. '"

Comments

Re:I remember something like that...

[Stephen Samuel]

Similarly for me, doing a backup to rsd1a instead of rst1a (disk instead of tape). I hit 'break' real fast and spent the rest of that night (and much of the following morning) recovering the data on that disk.

It turns out that I didn't actually lose that much, but I had to write my own version of tar to suck off the parts of the disk that I could still reach (I had a terminal open in an affected (the most important!) subdirectory, I just couldn't doi any thing that tried to access the mount point (like 'pwd').

I had a hot date the next evening that didn't turn out that hot, when I pretty much fell flat on my face and didn't get up.
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Re:One Question

[MrBogus]

http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/linus_ finland_period.shtml is a fairly detailed story about the beginnings of Linux and the problems that folks were having getting a PC version of BSD out.

For those of you who don't get this...

[TheOutlawTorn]

The "Dry Finnish Humor" patch is currently being reviewed by Alan Cox and should be available Real Soon Now. Linus sees no need for it, as he already gets the jokes.