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Kindle Notes & Highlights
despite a conducive environment and comforting faith, there is unease among the rooms’ inhabitants, a rising tide of something close to fear. They know that a terrible ghost is abroad in the cloisters of Microsoft.
here was Linus Torvalds, one of the hacker princes, who not only washed regularly, kept his hair short, and wore neat, clean clothes, but had a respectable job, was married, and was a father.
lol
Peter Salus, author of A Quarter Century of Unix, generally regarded as the standard history of the operating system, explains how Unix came about:
get this
The Mythical Man-Month, was
get
This turn of events might have left Stallman in despair, but he channeled his pain into an anger that would spur him on to undertake a crusade that continues to this day. He
lol
Stallman, too, should be seen as more than just the greatest hacker who has ever lived–which he almost certainly is.
time in an unusual way: “Jan-Feb was spent about 70–30 playing [the computer game] ‘Prince of Persia’ and getting acquainted with the machine.” In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that Linus’s main activity before writing Linux was playing “Prince of Persia” for two months,
Zak D. Kohler liked this
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
will never be the kind of professional OS that Hurd will be (in the next century or so :), but it’s a nice learning tool (even more so than minix, IMHO), and it was/is fun working on it.”
I don’t usually get into flames, but I’m touchy when it comes to linux :)”
These days most people don’t get the pun [Wexelblat notes], but this thing came out of X386 which had gone commercial, and since we were doing freeware, ours was XFree86.
Stallman made an unfortunate deduction: “He decided that Linux should be renamed LiGNUx,” pronounced “LIG-NUX.” Stallman doubtless found this wordplay irresistible
In the early 1990s, he says, “the Unix industry is all excited about what they’re doing, and they think they’re going to win and blah-blah-blah. But the real answer is, if you look out a few years, as an engineer you could see very, very clearly that they were committing suicide,” for reasons his paper would spell out.
The vendors think ‘standards’ are the answers. The programmers think ‘free’ software is the answer. The customers think NT is the answer.”
I knew Richard before he had long hair and a Jesus complex.
“RMS was not invited,” Raymond explains. “I argued that he should be, and lost the argument. Tim O’Reilly and the other co-organizers thought he would disrupt the effort to achieve a consensus from which we could go forward.”
The more users he met, the more diverse his target market seemed to be. “I’m going, OK, let’s see, my target market is rocket scientists at NASA or it’s blue-haired art students in Toronto,”
Qt came from a small Norwegian company called Trolltech,
“Qt” was the Quasar Toolkit, and is pronounced “cute” by those inside the company.
My girlfriend was deep into primate
Trolltech
