If you haven't read it, Torvalds' book is pretty interesting. He's a fairly blunt writer of prose - alas, no Hemingway - but has a good voice and his slightly-cynical Finnish humour comes through clearly. Doesn't have the massive ego that you might have expected, either - he knows he's one of the planet's biggest nerds.
Essentially, his somewhat geeky summer project was to implement the POSIX parts of Minix as a learning exercise, and basically locked himself in his room till he'd done it. Photocopied the spec sheet, and was 'ticking off' all the calls he'd got working. He was dual-booting with Minix for a while, which is why the filesystem layout is the same, but at one point managed to break his Minix boot, and Linux had to become self-hosting.
Fair play to him - took him a few months to produce the OS kernel that the whole GNU team couldn't manage in a decade. Perfect is the enemy of good. Open-sourcing 'something that works' was all that was needed for everyone else to add in all the bits they needed as well, and the rest is history.
Ukraine existed as People's Republic and then a republic within the USSR since 1917, with some border changes particularly after WW2. And of course, it was Zaporozhian Sich / Cossack Hetmanate before that.
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If you haven't read it, Torvalds' book is pretty interesting. He's a fairly blunt writer of prose - alas, no Hemingway - but has a good voice and his slightly-cynical Finnish humour comes through clearly. Doesn't have the massive ego that you might have expected, either - he knows he's one of the planet's biggest nerds.
Essentially, his somewhat geeky summer project was to implement the POSIX parts of Minix as a learning exercise, and basically locked himself in his room till he'd done it. Photocopied the spec sheet, and was 'ticking off' all the calls he'd got working. He was dual-booting with Minix for a while, which is why the filesystem layout is the same, but at one point managed to break his Minix boot, and Linux had to become self-hosting.
Fair play to him - took him a few months to produce the OS kernel that the whole GNU team couldn't manage in a decade. Perfect is the enemy of good. Open-sourcing 'something that works' was all that was needed for everyone else to add in all the bits they needed as well, and the rest is history.
https://goodreads.com/book/show/160171.Just_for_Fun
I can second that. The book is definitely entertaining to read.
life has a unique way of fucking up with your expectations
Man, it's such a shame it only works on that one, outdated kind of disk
Bummer it's not big and professional like Gnu, either.
"it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks"
Liar!
Never say never
Never!
Probably
Okay...
Probably a liar!
I like how it has the sad face at the end, like: this won't amount to much...sorry to disappoint you guys.
NOT protable :-(
Code for against Windows (table was the code word)
Mind you, there was no stackoverflow back then, so he most likely learned all that shit reading hard papers.
Well look at this rich kid who had access to relevant printed books.
Before internet I had nothing
I didn't even have power in my house back in 1991. Walked 5(both ways combined) miles to school every single day. Lmao.
I literally used to walk uphill, both ways, in the snow.
Well, in winter anyway. To the bus stop. Because I lived on one side of a hill and the bus stop was on the other.
Man, we really had it rough back then. God damn.
And he has stuck to his guns on that.
Per a post on Mastodon, today is also the 35th anniversary of the founding of Ukraine...
Not making a political statement but crazy that both of these happened on same day.
Ukraine existed as People's Republic and then a republic within the USSR since 1917, with some border changes particularly after WW2. And of course, it was Zaporozhian Sich / Cossack Hetmanate before that.
That was yesterday...
Today, 35 years ago, Belarus declared independence.
Damn, trusted Mastodon, should of confirmed with other sources...
Please stop.
What an idiot. Linux became huge.
Total dolt!
I would say a git.
🤔 there's a short and pregnant term that hasn't been used for Linux software yet
He didn't have any way of knowing at the time what Linux would become.
Thatsthejoke.jpg
Someone smart enough to make Linux so huge should have been smart enough to know that.
Damn, i don't have an AT disk, if i did i would try it out
Guess i'll have to stick to Linux 😞
You could also try that new Microsoft thing. Bob, I think.
I sort of remember that announcement. I ran to the university library to read about minix, but I don’t think I found any books.
the first edition of this book is what you would have been looking for: https://minix1.woodhull.com/osdi2/
Cool, thanks!