Articles like this always make me feel like I missed out on all the geek going on in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Of course I was a toddler when Xerox PARC was demonstrating their UI to Steve Jobs, and was in middle school when Linus was posting about his "(free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
So as I enter mid-life, I realize just how much I missed either not being old enough, not paying attention enough, or not having the means to get in the game. These stories of tech history, if nothing else, provide motivation for those, like myself, to get into the game and work on something useful -- and most of all something fun.
Better to ask what you can be part of now than worrying about what you missed.
The shape of computing has changed a bit since then but there's still a lot of very interesting work now and going forward.
But I totally get it... I've felt that way before about tech and music. In the case of music I spent so many years only paying attention to rock from the 70's, 80's and 90's and telling myself music was dead now, but it is not... it's just different and needs to be discovered.
Before that time you needed very big iron to do much at all, so unless you were in the right place, as well as the right time, it was hard to participate.
I began on 8-bit micros (assemler...an assembler woulda been a luxury to us...we typed in machine code and calculated negative offsets in us heads..+) and also a PDP-11/45 running V7 when I was in middle school. My perception is that prior to the 11/45, 11/70 generation I would have had to have been very lucky to have a usable computer to program. Having said that, I remember learning Pascal over one summer holiday when I was a kid, but I had no computer capable of running a Pascal compiler until a couple of years later.
Well, I would have been in 4th grade when Linux was posting about his free operating system, and we had an XT at home. My sister went to college in '93, so we gave her our old computer and got a brand-new 486/33. In 93 I was BBSing; 94 had a shell account, 95 had Linus' "hobby" installed on the family PC.. So I guess that was 8th/9th grade.
But I, too, often feel I "missed out". I guess it's part of the human condition :)
I got on board with Slackware[0] 3 for 80386. Tried Minix a couple of times, also FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. Linux killed them due to community. Among other luminaries I met with Jon 'Maddog' Hall[1] a couple of times around 2000-2001, once in Sydney and once in Taiwan. We had various discussions, and I recall he said Linux was going to be "huge" in embedded. In 2008, Android happened. Fast forward another 10 years and now I am in China running a hardware company, and we're yet to see an open mobile offering. Even as my company have migrated from Linux to smaller microcontrollers for most tasks, and as computing and electronics at all layers continue to seep in to the rest of society causing massive changes (social networking, consumer-first walled garden devices, connected TV, mobile payment, everything-aaS etc.) on unsuspecting, status-quo industries, it's interesting to reflect on the continued significance of Linux's culture in shaping the technical community.
I don't in any way miss the hardware and bandwidth limitations of those days... but sometimes not having a billion examples on tap forced you to engage more deeply or distinctly with system fundamentals.
[0] Today I am a supporter of Gentoo (IMHO the 'spiritual successor' to Slackware) and NixOS.
"Since nowadays GNU without Linux isn't hugely helpful, it's basically just been assimilated into core Linux and just about every distro of Linux includes GNU utilities or GNU versions of common UNIX-born tools."
Nowadays, GNU compiler collection with or without Linux can be hugely helpful. e.g., it's basically just been assimilated into "core BSD" and just about every distribution compiles with GCC.
Even in the case of one "distro" where it was recently removed from "core" and replaced with clang, it is still easily added back from the ports/packages collection.
Doesn't every major GNU tool have a clean-room implementation in BSD? Or I guess it would be more correct to say that BSD and GNU are both clean-room implementations of the original UNIX tools. Just thinking of the oft-posted, "Why GNU grep is fast" article.[0]
I'm not sure there are any major "gnu tools"? There are gnu flavored posix tools.
I'm not saying the gnu project isn't great (and I can't stand being constrained to posix tools without gnu extensions) - but the tools are generally from unix/posix?
Unless he means the Windows Subsystem for Linux but it is
my understanding that it is not runing a Linux kernel, but
mapping to the Windows (NT) kernel.
ytwj your comment has been killed for some reason and I don't have enough karma to vouch it.
There was some BSD code for the network stack in Windows 95. This was all legal and license compatible. I'm pretty sure it was gone by the next windows version.
Yes, the Windows TCP/IP stack was from BSD. I'm not sure if the code is still in Windows, but I think it is still configured via an etc/hosts file. I believe the BSD licence was preferable to Microsoft (as it was to Apple who based OSX on BSD). The networking stack was supposedly better on BSD than Linux too, but I'm not sure how correct that is (but I did hear that the software company I set up a website for in the mid 1990s switched from Linux to NetBSD pretty much as soon as I left for that reason).
> PARC had computers where multiple programs were on the screen simultaneously in "windows", and there was a pointer device used to control them—so cool. Doug Englebart was inspired too; he went back to Stanford Research Institute and invented the mouse to make control of those windows easier.
Is that right? Doug Englebart invented mouse in 1963. Unlikely PARC had any windowing system capable machine around that period.
UPDATE: PARC was founded 1970. So the influence should definitely be inversed.
Note that there is quite a big difference in goals between the MINIX versions that were current when Linus started writing Linux (i.e. MINIX 2.0 and earlier) and the MINIX3 project.
For early versions of MINIX the goal was teaching. Many limitations were left in place, both to keep the system simple and leave space for assignments for undergraduate students.
Many people in the MINIX community went to the Linux community because Andy Tanenbaum would usualy reject patches and Linus would welcome them.
Way later the MINIX3 project was created as research project. It has many cool ideas.
So as I enter mid-life, I realize just how much I missed either not being old enough, not paying attention enough, or not having the means to get in the game. These stories of tech history, if nothing else, provide motivation for those, like myself, to get into the game and work on something useful -- and most of all something fun.