"To put this discussion into perspective, when it occurred in 1992, the 386 was the dominating chip and the 486 had not come out on the market. Microsoft was still a small company selling DOS and Word for DOS. Lotus 123 ruled the spreadsheet space and WordPerfect the word processing market. DBASE was the dominant database vendor and many companies that are household names today--Netscape, Yahoo, Excite--simply did not exist."<p>Funny how another 15 years changes things. I wonder how many people will remember Netscape in a few years. I have never heard of Excite before this. Yahoo is just about the furthest thing from people's mind nowadays when talking about technology companies.
Choice quotes from ast:<p>> 5 years from now [1992 -> 1997] everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5<p>> My point is that writing a new operating system that is closely tied to any particular piece of hardware, especially a weird one like the Intel line, is basically wrong.
Can't help but chuckle at his apology / signature around the halfway point:<p>> Linus "my first, and hopefully last flamefest" Torvalds<p>Somehow I never noticed that before.
> In fact I have sent out feelers about some "linux-kernel" mailing list which would make the decisions about releases, as I expect I cannot fully support all the features that will /have/ to be added: SCSI etc, that I don't have the hardware for. The response has been non-existant: people don't seem to be that eager to change yet.<p>I guess interest materialized after a while...
Partially related, if somebody is interested The Linux Foundation together with edX MOOC platform are offering a free Linux course since few days[1].
It seems to be quite basic (I've just started it, knowing already something-but-never-enough of Linux) but considering that is provided by The Linux Foundation, "sponsored" by Linus Torvalds and it was normally done in real/virtual classroom for 2400$, it's probably worth doing it ;)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx-lfs101x-introduction-1621#.U-Wxct_E_JU" rel="nofollow">https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx...</a>
It's a trip re-reading this stuff. It was almost painful to read Linus' apology for going off on ast, only because I remember all too well being just that same young hothead just a little bit earlier (about a half decade or so).
Discussed just a few weeks ago - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8010719" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8010719</a>
So that took place on bulletin boards? What's the equivalent to it nowadays? Is there a place where the action take place with today big thinkers?
I never understood the significance of this. what's the big deal about it?<p>Someone made me read it when I was learning Linux for the first time 15 years ago. I'm not sure what I was supposed to get from it ...