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

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 10:50:51PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
+1 to everything Ted said, that's how I remember it as well.  I knew
about both Linux and 386BSD and while 386BSD felt very familiar to
a SunOS guy, there was something special about Linux.  For a while I
played with both, 386BSD was sort of better in that it had networking,
but like Ted, my network was a modem and TCP over a modem wasn't pleasant.
So Linux won out and eventually networked just fine.

> At the time when Linus announced his creation (not yet named) on
> comp.os.minix in August 1991, it was already self-hosting.  And that
> happened pretty quickly; he first started working on the project in
> June or July.
> 
> Around the end of 1991, I had added Job Control (implemented from
> POSIX.1 as a the specification), so we could put jobs in the
> background.  In 1992 X Windows was ported to Linux.  Networking
> support followed shortly thereafter.
> 
> > So all in all.. As I remember it, there was never really a decision to 'make 
> > this great new OS!'.. It kinda happened with right place, right time, right 
> > people, etc.
> 
> In the super-early days (late 1991, early 1992), those of us who
> worked on it just wanted a "something Unix-like" that we could run at
> home (my first computer was a 40 MHz 386 with 16 MB of memory).  This
> was before the AT&T/BSD Lawsuit (which was in 1992) and while Jolitz
> may have been demonstrating 386BSD in private, I was certainly never
> aware of it --- and Linus was publishing new versions every few days
> on an ftp site.  We'd send patches, and in less than a week, there'd
> be a new release dropped that we could download.
> 
> So the argument, "Linus would have never started on Linux if itT
> weren't for the AT&T Lawsuit" I don't think fits with the timeline.
> Development was very fast paced, and so it was *fun*.  And at least
> for me, the lacking of networking during the early days didn't bother
> me much, since I didn't have networking at home.  (I didn't have
> grounded outlets, either, in my 3 people for $1050/month apartment.
> Each leg was 50-60V to ground, and the wiring was cloth wrapped, and
> was either steel or aluminum; I never did figured out which....)
> Using zmodem over a 2400 bps modem was way more efficient than PPP, so
> even once we had networking, I didn't always bring up pppd.  And the
> most common way I would download source was using set of 1.44 MB
> floppies and a station wagon (literally; I was driving a Corolla wagon).
> 
> During those early days, the fact that Linux was more "primitive" than
> BSD may have been an advantage, since it sources was small, and
> release engineering is simple when you only support one architecture.
> 
> The other things I noticed was that because we didn't have the weight
> of the Unix/BSD legacy, we were more free to experiment.  Bruce Evans
> was working on the serial driver for FreeBSD, and I was working on the
> serial driver for Linux, and we had a friendly competition to see who
> could get better throughput using the very primitive 8250 and later
> 16550 UART.  The figure of merit we were using was the CPU overhead of
> a C-Kermit file transfer over two RS-232 ports connected via a
> loopback cable.  We'd compare notes to see how we could make things
> better, me for Linux, and Bruce for FreeBSD, and it was *fun*.
> Eventually, it got to the point where I was making changes to the tty
> layer to further optimize things, and at that point Bruce reported
> that he couldn't do some of the optimizations, since it would have
> required changing the TTY layer that had been handed down from the
> Gods of Olympus^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H BSD and so it was nixed by his
> colleagues in FreeBSD land.
> 
> In contrast, in Linux, people felt free to rip out and replace code if
> it would make things better.  Depending on how you count things, the
> networking layer in Linux was ripped out and replaced three or four
> times in the space of as many years.  Sure, the first version was
> pretty crappy, and was barely good enough for simple telnet
> connections.  But things got better fast, because people were felt
> free to experiment.
> 
> My personal belief is that it was this development velocity and
> freedom to experiment starting with a super simple base is what caused
> Linux to become very popular amongst the those who just wanted to play
> with kernel development.  Compare and contrast Linus's willingness to
> accept patches from others and his turnaround time to get those
> patches into new releases with Bill Jolitz's 386BSD effort --- and I
> don't think you need the AT&T lawsuit to explain why Linux took off in
> 1991-1992.  FreeBSD and NetBSD was started in 1993 because of the
> failure of Jolitz to accept patches in a timely fashion.
> 
>     	     	  	     	     - Ted

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm