Happy Birthday, Linus

Glyn Moody writes "Today is the birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?"

Comments

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[tepples]

What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?

Not much different, as the people who built Linux distributions would instead have ported GNU to the kernel of FreeBSD.

Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[eln]

There's also at least a small chance that many of the kernel hackers who work on Linux today would have been working on the Hurd kernel. As it happened, the release of Linux essentially killed Hurd, although it's technically still around.

Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

[Rob Riggs]

That's only partly true. In '94 BSD was even or ahead of Linux in terms of features. The reason Linux ended up "the winner" is because there was a stark difference between the two communities in welcoming newbies into the fold. #unix was the place to go on IRC for abuse. In stark contrast, the folks on #linux were very patient and helpful.

I had both 386BSD and Slackware downloaded to floppy. I ended up running Linux because I was welcomed by the Linux community. Not so much with the BSD crowd. A little kindness is all it took to make Linux the world's most popular Unix OS.