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Linus to speak on "The Origins of Linux"
Paul J. White writes: "Everyone in Silicon Valley will probably be there when Linus Torvalds lectures on "The Origins of Linux" in Mountain View, California on Wednesday, September 19, 2001 at 6 PM. It's bound to be interesting, so sign up early!"
Linus is to speak at NASA Ames Main Auditorium. Perhaps NASA like the whole linux thing?
I actually saw Richard Stallman give a talk on linux 3 years ago when I was at Georgia tech. He discussed how the software project had grown from inauspicious roots as a terminal emulater that Linus had written in C to becoming an OS, based in Andrew Tannenbaum's xenix microkernel.
Of course, the time was ripe for a project like this, since Andrew wasn't willing to accept any patches to his system, effectively preventing the inclusion of virtual memory, multitasking and a useful filesystem. Stallman made the point that any usable ase for an OS would have been successsful at that point, as long as the developer was willing to accept people's additions. Linus just happened to be in the right place at the right time
It's funny to think that, had RMS had more foresight, we'd all be using HURD today, and Linus would be an unknown doctoral student/graduate at Helsinki university!
Denial isn't just a river in Italy
Several months ago /. did a book review on Torvald's own book, Just For Fun. If for whatever reason you can't go to his talk, I recommend the book. I've read it, and it's good.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.