"Rikard Johnels" wrote:
On Saturday 30 April 2005 15.21, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:
Sat, 30 Apr 2005, by kevanf1@gmail.com: [..]
Ok, number one, I have always been led to believe that Linus Torvalds developed Linux (not his name but given that name by the later developers) as part of his university course. It was first and foremost developed as a secure and stable operating system in a similar way to Unix but for running on IBM compatible PC's. Please, say if I'm wrong.
Not really, in his own words: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones"
Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 26N , 4 29 47E. + ICQ: 277217131 SUSE 9.2 + Jabber: muadib@jabber.xs4all.nl Kernel 2.6.8 + See headers for PGP/GPG info. Claimer: any email I receive will become my property. Disclaimers do not apply.
And BOY was he wrong!! I wonder what his thought had been if he'd know the way Linux would expload across the world, taking market shares, BIG market shares from Microsoft... :)
One thing he did say was that if he knew how hard a job it was going to be, he wouldn't have started it. Linus had limited objectives, Linus, Prof. Tannenbaum and just about every other pundit has been wrong in their initial reactions to Linux. Where Linus was right, Linux was not closed off to contributions from anyone, unlike BSD and its chosen few, so it garnered more interest, people said "WOW!, I want that stuff running on my hardware", judging it was too good for just PC's and all sorts of ports developed and were contributed, that's why it runs on about any hardware, imagine sitting at a screen and doing stuff with Linux/KDE on a mainframe and you can't see the difference between that and Linux/KDE on your PC, that's brilliance. People wanted Linux, it wasn't marketed to them, it didn't need billion dollar TV ads, it just sold itself on quality, speed, security, reliability, achieved maturity and the ability to work on hardware that was too slow to run anything else other than gathering dust. Someone says Linux is rubbish, don't take their word for it, bring out an otherwise useless box, install Linux free and judge for yourself -- I think many people did and those people delivered a resounding verdict --- Linux ROCKS! An example of people with hardened arteries ... I had colleagues who worked on mainframes and Solaris servers, in their daily work they used Windows laptops/desktops and they had their Solaris training at Sun, like we all did. Those guys refused to use bash, because on their Sun class they used the Bourne shell, they'd kill any xterm with bash on it, bring up one with the Bourne shell, type "ksh -o vi" and believe me, use vi to edit the command line. Now I've been using vi for about 23 years and I refuse to do such crass assness when there is bash, Tab keys, an up-arrow, backspace and arrow keys on my keyboard. On one occasion we were working on a large SPARC server with my Linux laptop connected and a colleague wanted to use an xterm to talk to the server, but it was in a different KDE virtual screen, when I got back I found my laptop at the kde login screen and colleague exasperated that he couldn't understand my "Linux rubbish", he'd switched it off and on again. If I tell you that one day you will reach a certain age and look at your contemporaries and realise in many of them that they are perfect facsimilies of their grandfathers and they took forty or 50 years to get that far back by the good year of 203x, believe me, they are many well on the way there now at age twenty-something. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux for all Computing Tasks