The Biggest Cults In Tech

bobby f. writes "Infoworld has published its list of the biggest cults in tech — including Palmists, Newtonians, Commodorians, the Brotherhood of the Ruby, IBM power systems fanboys, Ubuntu-ists, and Lispers. A pretty fun read (unless you really are a cult member)." Although I think it's pretty clear that the Apple camp isn't an opinionated cult, they're just always right. Fire away.

Comments

TFA In One Page

[BabyDuckHat]

http://www.infoworld.com/print/73433

Re:Perl?

[jgtg32a]

I'm not so sure, from what I can tell Perl is just a really good community, they know their limitations.

Ye Olde Apple Cult

[russotto]

Name: The Cult of Apple, Orthodox
Gathering of the Tribes: None since the diaspora
Major Deity: Steve Wozniak
Antichrist: Steve Jobs
Sacred Relics: The original Apple I, green screen monitors, the Disc II
Mantra: Apple II Forever

Re:Why Windows isn't a cult

[calmofthestorm]

Not all X users are X fanbois. I have a ubuntu using friend who hates it. He switched away from windows awhile back. Why does he stick with ubuntu? It sucks less, in his estimation. And it makes more intuitive sense (He's a chemist without much computer knowledge, but still technically-minded.)

I love linux and think it will solve all the world's problems from swine flu to windows vista. I am a fanboi.

But very few windows users are fanbois. Only a few actually like windows. OS X, nearly all its users seem to be drooling fanbois, but as you say this seems to be changing, and this may just be the set I know.

Linux is somewhere in between I find, but I'm at a tech school, and around here linux outnumbers windows anyway with os x being a clear leader.

Re:Cult #1

[keeboo]

Name: Commodore Amiga OS

You mean Commodore Amiga as whole.
During the second half of 1990s, after the original chipset started to show its age, a faction appeared insisting that the true value was the OS itself.
The OS was great (the kernel, datatypes, installable filesystems, the modularized structure etc), but I think what made the machine mythical was the whole stuff. It was an overload of perfection.

Major Deity: Jay Butterfield

I guess you mean Jay Miner.

Believed Antichrist: Commodore management True Antichrist: Wintel empire

I think it was the opposite. Amigans loathed x86 and DOS/Windows (it was indeed crap), but what really killed the platform was those Commodore management dumbasses.
It's a long history but basically they wasted lots of money in bad or plain stupid products (PC clones, x86-compatibility boards, A600...) and let the platform development stagnate (the stillborn AAA chipset, the switch from 68k processors to PA-RISC the engineers were considering etc).

Major religious rituals: Multitasking 100 programs at once,(...)

I personally liked to emulate a 68k Mac (actually it was more like a virtualization), then inside that emulate a x86, then inside that a DOS ZX-Spectrum emulator playing a game.
In parallel, a number of programs (like www browser, IRC client etc), as usual.

Sounds like no big deal nowadays, but back then it was different.
Mac OS was a joke (it lacked preemptive multitasking for years, programs used static memory alocation, it crashed if you coughed nearby etc), no comments on Windows 3.x, Windows 95 was not immediately viable. OS/2 worked well, but it was heavy and lacked apps (then it died).

Re:Cult #1

[dido]

I wonder how this got modded up, as it's demonstrably false. There are no secret books of the Bible, or secret doctrines relating to the Catholic faith. There are, however, many writings throughout the centuries that the Catholic Church has deemed heretical and censored. Big difference between the two. Anyone caught practicing or even reading of those heretical beliefs that were censored in the Church's heyday would have been burned at the stake or worse. Everything, however, relating to orthodox Catholic doctrine has always been openly and freely exchanged to anyone who wanted to practice the religion at least ever since the Roman persecutions ended in 311 AD. There is nothing of the hierarchical initiations you see in Freemasonry or Scientology for instance, where secret mysteries are revealed as you ascend.