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

[Wesley Parish]

There's a book called "Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental
Revolutionary" co-authored by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond that
sets out how he came to write the Linux kernel.

Wesley Parish

On 1/18/20, 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
>
>