Rare Recordings of 1994 Talks By a 24-Year-Old Linus Torvalds Re-Discovered (archive.org) 34
71-year-old Jon "maddog" Hall has been involved with Linux from the very beginning, and for Christmas shared two of the earliest recordings ever made of young Linus Torvalds speaking about Linux — recordings long thought to be lost.
Hall shares the story at Archive.org. In February of 1994 the chair of a user group for the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society "started sending emails (and copying me for some reason) about wanting to bring this person I had never heard about from Finland (of all places) to talk about a project that did not even run on Ultrix or DEC/OSF1.... After many emails and no luck in raising money for this trip I took mercy...and asked my management to fund the trip. I sat down to use it, and was amazed. It was good. It was very, very good."
24-year-old Torvalds was giving his first talks ever at a major conference — this one attended by 19,000 people — and he was nervous. In the end only 40 people showed up for "An Introduction to Linux" and "Implementation Issues in Linux", but Hall remembers that "there was great applause." Unfortunately the talks that Linus gave were lost.
Until now.
As I was cleaning my office I found some audio tapes made of Linus' talk, and which I purchased with my own money. Now, to make your present, I had to buy a good audio tape playback machine and capture the audio in Audacity, then produce a digital copy of those tapes, which are listed here...
Here is your Christmas present, from close to three decades ago. Happy Linuxing" to all, no matter what your religion or creed.
Hall shares the story at Archive.org. In February of 1994 the chair of a user group for the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society "started sending emails (and copying me for some reason) about wanting to bring this person I had never heard about from Finland (of all places) to talk about a project that did not even run on Ultrix or DEC/OSF1.... After many emails and no luck in raising money for this trip I took mercy...and asked my management to fund the trip. I sat down to use it, and was amazed. It was good. It was very, very good."
24-year-old Torvalds was giving his first talks ever at a major conference — this one attended by 19,000 people — and he was nervous. In the end only 40 people showed up for "An Introduction to Linux" and "Implementation Issues in Linux", but Hall remembers that "there was great applause." Unfortunately the talks that Linus gave were lost.
Until now.
As I was cleaning my office I found some audio tapes made of Linus' talk, and which I purchased with my own money. Now, to make your present, I had to buy a good audio tape playback machine and capture the audio in Audacity, then produce a digital copy of those tapes, which are listed here...
Here is your Christmas present, from close to three decades ago. Happy Linuxing" to all, no matter what your religion or creed.
Re:hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes what he's explaining at that point is what today is done in user land using the cmd "gio mount ftp://site [site] /mnt" nowadays. As he wouldn't trust it himself [to run in the kernel] (as compared to running /proc internally in the kernel, as a at the time useful feature to implement user land programs like ps and uptime).
I am still today in 2021 convincing many of my customers not to use mount -t smb or cifs to read from files in critical processes that shouldn't hang when for example the network gets disrupted because of this Netware-like nonsense concept of network resources being represented like normal file system mount points or 'Network drives'.
So if anything the audio cut at 30:37 is probably a good thing. Let's fill that hole up with: today, just use gio with gvfs or KIO with its kio-slaves and consume the URLs in user land instead. This is also what desktop file managers like Dolphin, Nautilus, Caja, etc nowadays do.
Re: (Score:2)
While unwrapping, one of my favourite quotes sofar (Score:5, Interesting)
"Also, I'm a performance freak. I actually compile into assembly code every once in a while just to look at what the compiler says. And if I don't like that I'll change the C code to compile better."
gcc -S ftw,
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"Also, I'm a performance freak. I actually compile into assembly code every once in a while just to look at what the compiler says. And if I don't like that I'll change the C code to compile better."
Is there anybody here who doesn't do that?
Godbolt (Score:2)
Is there anybody here who doesn't do that?
Java programmers?~~
More seriously:
Nowadays there's even Godbolt's Compiler Explorer [godbolt.org] to make the assembly analysis even more convenient, with a dash of cloud-base on top for "modernity", and suports a bit more languages than C.
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Is there anybody here who doesn't do that?
To be honest, I haven't looked at the assembly output in years.
But one of my new year's resolutions is to learn RISC-V, and looking at compiler outputs is a great way to learn.
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I don't think I've looked at assembly code in the last two decades, perhaps three. I kept switching between processor families, and assember just wasn't portable...but C code was.
OTOH, I don't think I've run code that was CPU speed limited since the days of the Mac II. Almost everything is I/O bound.
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I've done it when I've had to write some assembly code in an architecture I wasn't familiar with. I wrote the code in C and then ran it through the compiler to get it into assembly which I then keyed into the basic monitor program you usually have.
I've done it just to sanity test a new platform - if you can write a little piece of code that blinks an LED, you can often get a bit of debugging done.
On one platform, I did it with a JTAG debugger and got it to blink. I then dumped the memory bytes to a file and
Re: While unwrapping, one of my favourite quotes s (Score:2)
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And he's (sort of) right. But if you've already written the code in C then it makes sense (if you're CPU limited) to figure out whether the assembler is optimal. The problem is (or was) that different architectures find different approaches to be better. So what you really need is both high level optimization (i.e. algorithm, not code) AND low level optimization (i.e. a good optimizing compiler).
Re: (Score:1)
You didn't listen to the audio then. Linus is mentioning how totally braindead and totally useless /proc is in Plan9 System5 at around 28:00 and how the Linux /proc filesystem is extremely useful.
Braindead is used quite often in his speech.
I'm happy that Linus didn't change much. Kernel development is hard and PC-speech will not work to communicate what is needed to developers. Not now, not ever.
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He changed a lot.
Most people tend to change a bit when they get older.
Just because he used the word braindead back when he was younger doesn't mean he didn't.
Whatever.
He became waaaay more of a cunt.
You seem to have some sort of personal beef with Linus.
You should probably talk to a therapist about that, since the one appearing to be a complete cunt between the two of you is you.
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Pretty funny you took the time to write this, actually.
Thanks for the lols. Hope you deal with whatever personal issues caused you to be offended and need to respond anonymously to a comment that wasn't aimed at you in the least.
Oh wait...Linus? Is that you?
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You are the one who started calling people a cunt and now that you receive the same treatment you go ballistic.
Are you a child? Or you forgot to take your Xanax?
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You really think me saying "Pretty funny you took the time to write this, actually." is going ballistic?
lol.
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That you Linus?
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Lol, you really are the biggest cunt in this thread by far, posting as AC no less.
Go back to sucking dick to sate your own insecurity, cocksucker.
And, being as you are defined by insecurity, I'm sure you'll need to reply and have the last word, so have at it.
Re: (Score:3)
Linus is mentioning how totally braindead and totally useless /proc is in Plan9 System5 at around 28:00
No he doesn't. He says he read about Plan9's /proc and wanted to copy its features. Then he found out SystemV had it's own design of /proc and THAT is the one that is braindead. Plan9 and SystemV are not the same thing, and Linux was NOT talking about Plan9 /proc being braindead.
Flexing his math co-processor! (Score:1)
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And I suppose.... (Score:1)
nobody remembers the bomb threats towards the conference and the emails implying freedom was the purpose?
Very informative and entertaining (Score:2)
...and then I kind of added features, and soon it was the GNU Emacs of terminal emulators, and I called it Linux.
Who gives a shit? (Score:2)
I was there (Score:1)