Re: [slug-chat] a man who knows how to sign off

[Terry Collins <terry@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Hardy wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 09:18:45AM +1100, Terry Collins wrote:
> > Richard has been doing the hard work for a couple of decades that no one
> > else has been prepared to do.
> >
> > Do you really want the Minix situation all over again?
> 
> Alright, I'll bite.
> What was the Minix situation?
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter

CC'd to Slug-chat as there are quite a few people around who remember
Minix better than my impressions

I could just as easily have said BSD.
Before Linux, there was Minux, which was another copyrighted *nix like
operating system. It was developed by an academic for 286 HW and had
this tangle of licencing issues that was a major impediment to
development. You didn't role a distro, you went around collecting bits,
like code for "ls", "awk", "sort", etc. Then you tried to make them all
work together. Someone had a Slug post about circular dependencies, well
that was the norm. 

I was collecting bits, by dialling various BBSs at 2400 baud, for over a
year before I could even consider getting it going. Thankfully Linux
started to appear and started to provide a spaghetti free code..

BSD was also crippled by licensing issues, hence the development of
FreeBSD.

This is a very short version of PC *nix history.

Essentially RMS is a marker point of what we should be aiming for. He
keeps ramming home the GNU message and this enables people to keep on
track. If you think of first lessons on vector addition, RMS is a big
vector to keep us all headed in the general direction desirous.



--
   Terry Collins {:-)}}} Ph(02) 4627 2186 Fax(02) 4628 7861  
   email: terryc@xxxxxxxxxx  www: http://www.woa.com.au  
   WOA Computer Services <lan/wan, linux/unix, novell>

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