Happy Birthday, Linus 376
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?"
A case of the pundays (Score:5, Informative)
How would the world look different? It would be a whole GNU world.
BTW, Linus is 40 today, there seems to be no mention of that anywhere.
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Really? I wonder where you HURD that.
I hope Tove planned a big party for him, if it's the 40th.
No coprocessor... (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting read.
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The 486 SX was just a 486 that they could not guarantee that the coprocessor would work so it was switched off.
Re:No coprocessor... (Score:5, Funny)
If you were to tell me that Little Endianness was simply the result of someone putting something on an overhead projector the wrong way, I'd believe you (because it seems like an extremely fucking stupid idea otherwise: "2 ^ 16 equals five-hundred-thirty-six, sixty-five thousand"
If you were to tell me that the Pentium was really 64-bit, but the fabricators never hooked up the address pins because they never got the memo, I'd believe you.
No doubt, x86 is the cheapest, fastest and most prevalent CPU in computers today, and probably always will be, but fuck me if it doesn't look like the biggest kluge in the world.
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> The 486 SX was just a 486 that they could not guarantee that the coprocessor would work so it was switched off.
Exactly, I thought mostly every /. reader knew that but reading the comments and replies makes me feel a little old... ;-)
In short SX and DX where made at once, then on the testing stage, if the co-processor failed, they sold it as a SX, if it worked well, they sold it as a DX.
Note that this principle is still applied today, I wrote about it previously to explain why overclocking sometimes wor
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Nineteen years ago or so, I also got my hands on my first PC, pretty much same specs but with the coprocessor. My programming achievements at the time were pretty much limited to batch files. Linus wrote an OS on smaller hardware. Kinda makes me feel like I wasn't really using the full potential available to me :)
Of course, I was 10 years younger at the time :)
Re:No coprocessor... (Score:5, Funny)
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Still, Linus has been a great leader, and a tasteful (for some) architect. Thanks a lt for that !
Re:A case of the pundays (Score:5, Informative)
I would counter that, while it inevitably would have happened at some point, it's not a given that the resulting OS would have been GPLed, and subsequently things could've turned out very differently. Happy Birthday, Linus!
Re:A case of the pundays (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just that more people are willing to contribute, when they feel that fruits of their labor can't be just "taken" as freely as BSD license allows.
Bullshit, and there are plenty of very popular projects which would demonstrate the contrary -- sqlite, for example, has no license. That's because it's entirely public domain.
To take another random example: Ruby on Rails. The license deliberately is not GPL, or even LGPL (which might have worked), but rather MIT. This means I could technically "take" it -- remember, it's not stealing, and it's not even copyright infringement here -- and build my own proprietary product.
It also means that unless I relish maintaining my own separate fork of Rails, I'll be sending patches upstream whenever I do something cool. Even monkeypatches are much easier to send in as formal patches than to maintain.
I used to think as you do, but the choice here is between the potential audience of every commercial product versus a few GNU zealots who will actually refuse to contribute to a project because they don't like the license.
I can see people contributing to Linux instead of BSD if they prefer GPL, and if there are no other factors. But if Linux didn't exist, would you really refuse to contribute to BSD?
Yesterday, I sent a patch to a project hosted by Google. They wanted me to sign an agreement essentially giving them copyright and a patent grant (without removing those rights from me) -- and this isn't Google being evil, it's common for projects to request copyright for contributions. I wasn't exactly happy about it, but it again comes down to the same choice -- are the terms of that agreement so bad that I'm going to refuse to contribute at all, or worse, fork the entire project? Probably not, especially for the small patches I have in mind.
And by the way: If you believe in the GPL, and you pirate anything (movies, music, games...), you're a hypocrite. A term common among those who have a problem with current copyright law is, "It's not theft, it's copyright infringement," implying that it's not as bad. I've occasionally heard people say that if there was no copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL, but I don't buy that -- if you really believe that, why not use BSD or MIT?
Re:A case of the pundays (Score:4, Insightful)
GPL is more than just about copyright. It's about giving back.
No, giving back is about giving back.
GPL is about forcing you to give back, through copyright -- or it's about restricting people who refuse to give back from using it. It was created to counter the perceived (and very likely real) threat of people building a giant proprietary product out of what was once free, and everyone inevitably upgrading to the shiny new proprietary version, leaving everyone without the ability to change their own code.
But free software, as a concept, doesn't require the GPL. Nor does free software, as a movement, rely on the GPL at this stage.
how is having a problem with one part of a law mean you have a problem with the whole law.
Copyright is a way of expressing what you want done with copies of your intellectual property.
If you have a problem with copyright, or with the idea of intellectual property, I can certainly see a case for that -- and I'd love free-as-in-beer and DRM-free movies. I can certainly see piracy inevitably crushing those who cling to draconian DRM.
But to then turn around and suggest the GPL?
Think about your reaction when you see a gpl-violations story, versus an MPAA story. When it's the RIAA or MPAA, everyone (myself included) is quick to call them the MAFIAA and to defend piracy as "copyright infringement, not theft", and even suggest that there are no moral issues with it.
But when it's a GPL violation, suddenly copyright matters and everyone is morally outraged.
They both rely on the exact same part of the law -- they both rely on the assumption that just because you wrote something, you should be able to control what people do with it.
Actually, I'll play devil's advocate for a moment -- if you consider it as a social issue, rather than a legal one, the GPL is about forcing people to share. If you think sharing is good, then you probably see the GPL as a way to encourage more sharing than would happen otherwise -- and there would probably be even more sharing with no copyright, so you'd gladly give up the GPL if it meant copyright law is gone forever. This is probably why such licenses are referred to as "copyleft".
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i guess, but linux happened at the exact right time. Hurd was a mess (i think it was at its second or third rewrite at the time, trying for the last fad in kernel design), bsd was in court, minix was anything but open/free/whatever.
so in the end, linux was a case of scratching a itch, in combo with the choice between sitting in a heated room to write code or walk across a cold campus to access the university terminals. One can say that humans are at their most creative when they want to be lazy.
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Re:over 40 (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Authority_on_Linux [wikipedia.org]
"About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself.[13] Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.[18]"
Do you know how much output that is?! Also, consider for a minute, that Linux isn't like the lightbulb, invent once and the work is done. How far would linux have gone if work quit in 1991, 1995, 2000? It's a work-in-progress.
The world is littered with half-assed and half-finished projects, particularly software. It's far better that Linus brings and continues one project to excellence than do a dozen mediocre projects that quite never get there.
Maybe you should go out and invent something. If it had 1/100 of the impact Linux has, you'll the world for the better significantly.
Re:over 40 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:over 40 (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone knows "42" is the real milestone.
Re:over 40 (Score:5, Insightful)
Linus invented 'git' much more recently, in 2005. If you haven't reviewed it for source control, and compared it to Subversion at Subversion's expense, I urge you to do so. It is lighter weight, _far_ faster, allows remote development far more easily, and actually pays attention to security with its far better handling of SSH keys and its built-in GPG signatures for software tags.
I can also attest that you only give up on life at 40 if your first 40 years weren't worth living. And in that case, your age probably wasn't the problem.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [debian.org].
Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
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.
I doubt it would have happened. The Hurd hackers wanted to do fundamental OS research, and everyone else wanted a "Unix" kernel that they could just use and hack around with, and which didn't cost a lot.
I can remember that the biggest factor in our little group of hackers moving to Linux (from 386BSD) was that it had working shared libraries. OK, they sucked in many (many!) ways, but it still meant that you didn't need to have loads of copies of libc in memory or on disk at once. On the small machines of the time, that was a massive saving.
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What I still don't understand is why BSD didn't fill the void that linux filled. Just because of the permissive license?
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Because BSD was being disputed in court:
BSD 4.4 was only released in '
Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
Just because of the permissive license?
Partly - commercial BSD derivatives and the BSD networking stack ending up in Windows 95 put off some developers - who wants to see their work being co-opted by Microsoft and other corporations in closed source products? Some people no doubt, but not the majority. Another effect of the licensing was that BSD splintered into different, slightly incompatible commercial forks. The GPL protected Linux from that fate - the free distributions were shipping more-or-less exactly the same kernel code as the commercial distributions - the general perception was that with Linux free didn't mean "less", it just meant "no telephone support". In BSD land, "free" (to many) meant "not as good as what Sun and IBM are selling".
Another factor was that BSD was seen by some Europeans as being controlled by some American labs and American universities. This made it seem less approachable - and harder to get your code into. Linus, in contrast, welcomed good patches with open arms. Linus was highly enthusiastic about people developing code for his kernel. The same enthusiasm for outsiders was not visible within the BSD community.
Yet another factor was the number of Linux distributions that sprung up. Competition is good - Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, etc. were all competing to make the best Linux distribution, and there were numerous other distributions trying to push them from the top. In contrast, BSD was more centrally controlled, and whilst there was some competition between distributions, there wasn't a great amount. Plus the licensing made forks more likely - with GPL and Linux, if someone wrote a good patch, it was highly likely that patch would end up in all Linux distributions fairly rapidly. The same could not be said of BSD and its various commercial forks.
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Oh how the times have changed... now we run entire VMs just to run single applications...
And yet, there is still similar sharing going on.
Almost every VM hypervisor (and definitely every good one) uses a shared code page system so that there aren't duplicate copies in RAM. Recently, I was running 4 Fedora VMs set to 512MB of RAM each, and the total memory the host used was about 600MB.
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While it would run in similar POSIX way, there is enough difference in the BSD and GNU/Linux license, that Free software would be very different. Don't underestimate the power of the philosophy behind the software.
Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course the GNU/GPL is part of the success of Linux. On one extreme, there are those who believe GPL is more than a license, it is religion itself and RMS is their prophet. If the license didn't matter, many of the people writing software only for the GNU/GPL now might have working on BSD instead. Not every programmer is license agnostic. That doesn't mean that Free software (as a whole) would necessarily be behind the current state, but there are many people who are are a part of the "Linux only" sce
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If Bill Jolitz hadn't dropped off the face of the Earth for a year and perhaps even when he wasn't incommunicado if he had been more receptive to help from other people who wanted to pitch in we might be running a lot more 386BSD.
Instead he ceded the high ground (IMO) to Torvalds.
surley OSP (Score:2)
spending that cash on a yearly subscription to playboy certainly would have netted the world a new open source porn system providing free as in beer porn to the world!
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Yeah, but it would have that crappy Finnish porn.
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Yeah, but it would have that crappy Finnish porn.
You don't care for Tom of Finland? To each his own.
What would the world look like? (Score:3, Funny)
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Nostalgy at its best.
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Does anyone else get queasy looking at Windows 3.1?
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At the end of that link:
Wrong password
This GUI doesn't have this feature.
That cracked me up. XD
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Nobody has said this yet? (Score:2)
Happy birthday Linus!
Alternate timeline... (Score:2)
If he had bought a Trash-80, would we all be programming Motorola chips today?
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If he had bought a Trash-80, would we all be programming Motorola chips today?
Maybe, but it wouldn't be because of the TRS-80, which had a Zilog Z80 CPU.
Re:Alternate timeline... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, Amiga would have been also a very valid choice back then, at least in Europe. I wonder if Linus ever said why he went with a PC.
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Not in case of A3000, which would be likely equivalent. Or A2000 with upgraded CPU.
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was the TRS-80 even available outside of USA?
btw, he started out on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL [wikipedia.org]
if the opening of the article is correct. Only when he reached university did he get the 386...
blinded (Score:2)
And then shot his eye out.
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At age 19? Hardly! You'd have to be pretty stupid (or six years old) to do that.
BTW, I hated that corny movie.
this is what happened (Score:4, Funny)
We will never know (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe without Linux we would use Minix or Hurd today. While Linus caused an crystallization point for hundreds of developers he did not write the thing alone. these people were already there. More or less waiting for something like this to happen. Most of them were already part of the Minix mailing list. So most likely Linux was already waiting to happen then. From my own time as an undergraduate. all the good programmers wanted to write an OS. And when it Linux came into existence everyone said cool. I take it and I do something with it. The same happened later with the browser as well. And if X11 would have had a better programming interface there would have been more different browsers out there. Still. Thanks to Linus for starting it.
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minix was in no way free at the tho, iirc. It only became free in response to the success of linux...
hell, thinking about it, i wonder if the monolithic vs micro-kernel debate was a indirect case of fud marketing for minix...
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While Linus caused an crystallization point for hundreds of developers he did not write the thing alone. these people were already there. More or less waiting for something like this to happen. Most of them were already part of the Minix mailing list. So most likely Linux was already waiting to happen then. From my own time as an undergraduate. all the good programmers wanted to write an OS.
A lot of people are in the wishful thinking brigade of "It would be cool to..." without ever walking the walk, they just like to dream about it. I know it with myself that it's pretty easy to dream up grand projects, something completely different to drive them to practical completion. I'm sure some people would have created a basic OS just to let it fizzle for lack of interest or because of final exams or because they got a job or got a girlfriend or family or didn't really like all the hard real-life prob
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Alternate Reality? (Score:2, Funny)
DX or SX? (Score:2)
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That's what I thought too, but we're just confusing it with the 486DX/SX... The 386SX had a 16bit external bus.
Re:DX or SX? (Score:4, Informative)
The 386SX was a 32 bit processor internally but had a 16 bit data bus. The 386DX was a straight 32bit processor all the way through. There was a third flawed varient that had a problem switching between real and protected mode that could lock up the system. Those chips would be stamped that they were only certified for 16 bit apps. The ones that tested good had a double sigma stamp on them. Neither the 386sx nor 386dx had math coprocessors. The 486 however was a different story. The 486DX had a coprocessor but the 486SX did not.
Doesn't qualify for one-name status (Score:4, Informative)
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most people think of the blanket-carrying kid in Peanuts.
Perhaps anywhere else, but not here on slashdot. And a heads up: RMS usually refers to Richard Matthew Stallman, not Root Mean Square... even though most of us here know the uses of the latter.
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most people think of the blanket-carrying kid in Peanuts.
Perhaps anywhere else, but not here on slashdot. And a heads up: RMS usually refers to Richard Matthew Stallman, not Root Mean Square... even though most of us here know the uses of the latter.
And if you hear the denizens referring to a RIM job, it's getting employment at the maker of Blackberry...
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Didn't you know? The blanket-carrying kid grew up and wrote an operating system kernel!
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This is slashdot. Half the acronyms posted to the news headers are lost on me.
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Linus (Torvalds): Sounds like "Penis"
Most Americans might (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's a bit more than just North America.
386dx, no coprocessor? (Score:2)
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Nope that distinction didn't find its place until the Intel 80486 line of CPU's. Back during the 80386 days it was only differntiating between 16 and 32 bit handling --> http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/386+DX [thefreedictionary.com].
Happy Birthday! (Score:2)
And, many happy more!
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Yes, Linus, if you're reading this, happy birthday! :)
Birthday money (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps better spent on a $699 license from SCO. /sarc
That's my first computer too (Score:2)
DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc
That's almost exactly my first computer too. Altough I really had a 20 MB harddisk, but I used doublespace to get 40 MB. And I didn't have the Intel DX33, but the Cyrix DX40 instead. That 7 MHz really made the difference.
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My first computer (that i bought myself) was a Unisys 386SX-33, 4MB of RAM. i had a massive 80MB harddrive though. for some reason i decided to install OS/2 2.1 on it.
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There wasn't an Intel 40MHz 386.
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Exactly. Both Cyrix and AMD offered 386's and 486's at higher clockspeeds and for less money than what Intel was selling. I also had a 80486 DX later which ran at a crazy 125 MHz. It wouldn't be for much, much later that Intel sold chips at those frequencies.
But anyway, the whole game changed when the Pentium came around and Intel could actually patent their chip for the first time. Cyrix was dead a short time after and AMD was forced into the niche were it remained till this very day.
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I don't remember whether Cyrix made a 40Mhz 386 or not. My first IBM PC-contemptible system was an AMD 386-40, 16M of RAM, with an Adaptec 1542B & 212M SCSI disk, a Diamond Stealth video card (I think; that might have come later), Sound Blaster, and combo 3.5"/5.25" floppy. A superb machine for the time, but I think I paid $2000 for it.
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Powerful computer (Score:2)
For his age, that was a pretty powerful first computer. I'm a few years younger than Linus, and my first computer was a TI-99/4A, followed by an Amiga 1000 (512K RAM, no HDD). I think many people of our generation started with floppy-based computers (Apple II, TRS-80, VIC-20, C64, Amiga) with less than 1 MB RAM. I saved up for and purchased the Amiga from my job as a bagger at a grocery store. Paid $750 for it used, and it came with a monitor and an external floppy drive (really saved on the disc swapping
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My first computer was an Amiga 500, for which I paid around $600 with the RF adapter... and I hooked it right up to my TV and learned to live with badly flickering interlaced graphics. And I only had one floppy drive, oh the humanity. Actually I had a C= 16 before that, but no storage device so it hardly counts. But lots of my peers started out with cassette storage...
What kind of a Pentium is that? (Score:2)
Heey, DX33? What kind of a Pentium is that?
Grattis på födelsedagen! (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, I'm showing off - I lived in Sweden 18 years, became fluent in Swedish, and I'm guessing (from his name) that Linus is mother tongue Swedish rather than Finnish.
But we're raising a glass and shouting "Skål" and "Gippis" and so on...
Re:Grattis på födelsedagen! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm amused by all the HURD references (Score:2)
The open source "competition" to Linux has been *BSD. If Linux had never existed, we'd all be running *BSD. End of story, really. And it would have happened quickly - if memory serves, the only reason Linux took off was because BSD was still in or had just gotten out of the long clusterfrack legal disputes. If there had been no Linux, *BSD would have picked up its steam, only a year or two later.
At some point, someone would have married the best parts of GNU with *BSD and you'd have RMS screaming about
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While the use of BSD code in a GPL'd project is possible (because the BSD license lets you do ANYTHING!) I'm not sure the inverse is true. So if the BSD kernel became the mainstream instead of Linux the only way it could use GNU/GPL code would have been to wrap the entire project in GPL. I guess this is what Debian is doing. However BSD has it's own versions of the GNU programs and stands quite well on it's own.
What if Linus had bought a mac? (Score:2)
Maybe he would have bought a mac, developed an appreciation for user experience design at the start of a project, collaborated with usability experts to design a free standardized user friendly UI when he first started work on Linux, and today Linux on the desktop might be light-years ahead of where it currently is.
NeXT (Score:2)
I wanted a NeXT at that time. Man, $6500! But there was no Photoshop equivalent for NeXT, despite their photoshopped brochures, so I called their office in California (seriously) to see if they had any image manipulation software. The person on the phone, a very nice woman, only had scripts to read from. Later that week, though, I happened to see a piece of mail sent from the Free Software Foundation to a professor at my university. (Just the return address, not the contents of the letter.) That's when it f
Props to Linus (Score:2)
If he spent his money on something else? (Score:2)
Well maybe the world's computers would run on hookers and blow?
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Its your mom's birthday, too?
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no, you're wrong (Score:2)
You fail your nerd lore. Turn in your nerd badge immediately.
80386DX had a 32-bit bus and came in a small PGA package. and 80386SX was only 16-bit(24-bit address) and generally was not socketable. There was a mathco for each, the 80387DX was a PGA package, the SX was a PLCC package.
80486DX has a math co and the SX did not (both 486 models were 32-bit bus and could fit in the same socket)
I miss my 80386DX+80387mathco system. it was a sweet setup.
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A DX33 had a math co-processor,
Only if you also installed a 387. Or perhaps a Weitek Abacus 3167.
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Whether he's a douche or not is immaterial to his accomplishments. He wrote (originally) and later managed the development of the kernel that allowed GNU to become part of something mainstream. Whatever Hurd may have done, the remains that it was dramatically behind schedule and short of developers when Linus produced his first kernel; and didn't manage to catch up in either capability or developer interest during the years that Linux was little more than a barely functional hobby system. Douche or not, L
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Open source would be a lot better off with a few less egomaniacs like Linus and a few more - dare I say it? - RMS's.
RMS not an egomaniac? lolwut? The whole GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux thing is nothing but pure egomania on RMS's part.
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What if Columbus was wrong? At a certian point, such speculation becomes meaningless ;)