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Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the turn-back-the-clock dept.

eldavojohn writes "Following our last history lesson of Linux 0.01, the Kernel Trap is talking about the following announcements that would lead to one of the greatest operating systems today. A great Linus quote on release 0.02 (just 19 days after 0.01): 'I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.'"

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:15 years later... by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Insightful

    More ironic: the Linux kernel is slowly becoming a hybrid monolithic/micro-kernel.

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    How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Re:Great quote by Linus by Comatose51 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I've been reading "The Myth of Innovations" and "Black Swan". They're two books on different subjects but with a similar underlying theme: there's a great deal more randomness and unpredictability in this world than we like to admit. Things don't progress in a linear fashion but usually in parallel and in the form of a tree. Only in hindsight does it look linear because all the other branches have died out and been eliminated. This quote by Linus really illustrates this point. At that time, no one really knew what was going to happen to Linux. It could have gone in a million directions (forking in computer science terms).

    I think of the great advantages the OSS model has over closed source is that when these branches die out their work and whatever grain of usefulness/truth don't die with them. It's precisely the ability to fork and create another branch that allows OSS to really evolve and try out all the million possibilities. With closed source and an overly strict copyright scheme the overhead of trying those possibilities are too expensive. (regurgitating Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of the Network" here)

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  3. Re:15 years later... by byolinux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It runs X. I was using GNU yesterday, browsing the web, wrote some email, sent some email, IRC, SSH...

    What more do you need?

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