[TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"

[Brantley Coile]

Since I was a close observer and an early adopter of Plan 9, which is still my main development platform, I'll contribute my thoughts on the question.

Plan 9 was still being developed in the time frame that Torvalds was working out Linux. Everyone working in the Unix field wanted a version that was not under AT&T's expensive license. The last one I bought was north of $64K. 

The biggest reason that Plan 9 isn't the current Linux is that the world didn't need a cloud operating system in the early 1990's. They just needed a Unix for which they could get the source.

Plan 9 solves the problem of "How do I make a bunch of machines look like a single system?" If you wanted to mess around with a system in the early 1990's you didn't have a bunch of people and a bunch of systems you needed to make appear as one. You just had a single box. 

So, my Plan 9 remains small. In fact, I've been removing things from it, like local disks, that is contrary to the original vision. (Or set of visions. I remember getting a lot of different answers form everyone involved in 1127 about what it was that they were doing.)

The general question of why Linux emerged and not others didn't is a very hard question that computer historians will be researching for a lot time. It's complex, like all economics.

  Brantley

> On Jan 17, 2020, at 11:01 AM, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo at alchemistowl.org> wrote:
> 
> [I originally asked the following on Twitter which was probably not the smartest idea]
> 
> I was recently wondering about the origins of Linux, i.e. Linux Torvalds doing his MSc and deciding to write Linux (the kernel) for the i386 because Minix did not support the i386 properly. While this is perfectly understandable I was trying to understand why, as he was in academia, he did not decide to write a “free X” for a different X. The example I picked was Plan 9, simply because I always liked it but X could be any number of other operating systems which he would have been exposed to in academia. This all started in my mind because I was thinking about my friends who were CompSci university students with me at the time and they were into all sorts of esoteric stuff like Miranda-based operating systems, building a complete interface builder for X11 on SunOS including sparkly mouse pointers, etc. (I guess you could define it as “the usual frivolous MSc projects”) and comparing their choices with Linus’.
> 
> The answers I got varied from “the world needed a free Unix and BSD was embroiled in the AT&T lawsuit at the time” to “Plan 9 also had a restrictive license” (to the latter my response was that “so did Unix and that’s why Linus built Linux!”) but I don’t feel any of the answers addressed my underlying question as to what was wrong in the exposure to other operating systems which made Unix the choice?
> 
> Personally I feel that if we had a distributed OS now instead of Linux we’d be better off with the current architecture of the world so I am sad that "Linux is not Plan 9" which is what prompted the question.
> 
> Obviously I am most grateful for being able to boot the Mathematics department’s MS-DOS i486 machines with Linux 0.12 floppy disks and not having to code Fortran 77 in Notepad followed by eventually taking over the department with X-Terminals based on Linux connected to the departmental servers (Sun, DEC Alpha, IBM RS/6000s). Without Linux they had been running eXeed (sp?) on Windows 3.11! In this respect Linux definitely filled in a huge gap.
> 
> Arrigo
>