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Linux at 20, Some Personal Memories

posted by mrpg on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the RAM-is-memory dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Take a walk down memory lane...

This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer read it to you at high speed is an even better option.

Linux is 20 years old this year. That's a long time. Since I was there from the beginning I thought I'd share some memories of what's happened.

In 1988 I graduated from high school, and got accepted into the University of Helsinki to study computer science. The studies started in September, and also in September I got invited to join Spektrum, the Swedish speaking club for those studying math, physics, chemistry, geography, or computer science.

Spektrum is a social club, which was good, since I was, and remain, shy and socially awkward, and the club provided me with a way to easily meet people when I'd moved into a new city. That's also where I met the only other Swedish speaking new CS student of that year, a guy named Linus Torvalds.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:31PM (#444792)

    As a meek first year student, I wouldn't have dared disturb such discourse. Linus wasn't so meek, but he didn't want to post something and be shown to be wrong.

    The RTFM/neckbeard attitude is the same as it ever was. It does encourage one to do more homework before asking questions, but also may scare away potential users.

    The application was written in dBASE IV, which taught me that I should not let others pick my tools for me, and that although it may be possible to write good software using bad tools, it's something to be avoided if at all possible.

    dBASE was great as long is you went with its UI conventions rather than try to reinvent your own UI. It has powerful table-oriented commands that do most of the grunt work for you; and you don't have a database layer seperate from the application layer, meaning less middle-man code and less marshaling back and forth between memory and the DB. The down-side is you lose database vendor swappability, but few cared about that back then. Tight integration means it does a lot of data chomping with minimal code, almost in an APL sense. Those who hate it seemed determined to reshape the UI in their own image.

    You perverts who think the word sauna is a synonym for brothel can stop imagining orgies: in Finland, saunas are for bathing, medication, even meditation, not sex.

    That "denial" will only fuel the rumors. The Bowie-Jagger-like speculation lives; ports were scanned and probed, we know it ;-)

    It helps to be stupid and ignorant in the right way, so that you think "hey, I can do that" instead of "that must be very difficult to do".

    I hope this works for politicians also.