Jon "maddog" Hall talks Unix and Linux history 

mope worthy of peace prize than Obama.

@@Canadian789119 that isn't hard to achieve.

Richard Stallman, Definitely Yes.

Send the suggestion of the peace prize to Norwegian parliament that get nominate and then decide who get the peace prize. No, that one isn't decided in Stockholm.

Agreed.

that's because you brain stores only important information that is interesting, the brain doesn't store memory like a computer.

@@ChristopherGray00 Yep absolutely right.

Yes, great person with great memory.....

Yes that too. He in fact wanted a *nix-like OS for his own use. There's many reasons floating around.

It was hard _not_ to be aware of GNU back then, because their tools were often better than what was shipped with commercial UNIX variants, and it was Free Software. GNU was the obvious choice for the application layer.

Actually Unix was not really free for educational purposes. It was *very* low price (a few hundred dollars) for a site wide source code (the only way it was distributed at the time). Unfortunately if you were not a *research* university (Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, etc) the price was tens of thousands of dollars per CPU. I know that, because I tried to buy it for my small two-year technical college.

On the UNIX side: In the 80s I worked for Imperial College Computer Center and we got one of those university copies of Unix source. At the time I had just written a C compiler for the CDC6500 and could also cross compile for the 8086. So I got Unix running on an iSBC86-12 Multibus system around about the time IBM PCs started.

Naah man. The Holy Trinity is Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan.

​@@FranciscoMNeto I think there is a whole bunch of holy people who got funded in one or another way and now we got where we are.

What about Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan - "The three Wise men"? Don't forget about them!! 2 yr. old thread......oh well.....still

Yeah, and Stallman is only a clown! He have made him self a clown. His only trying to get glory to himself, from anything.

Stallman is a gifted programmer and a complete f*cktard

I wonder when they invented the program screen. I could probably look that up. But why would I? You facts are more interesting :) PS. had to look it up. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Screen#History

I think C on all over this superb "novel" was like tomatoes on pizza, so he forgot to mention it

I think the machine named perch at our university was an Alpha. It was definitely risc. But I was younger and didn't know asmuch back then.

I am glad you liked LFD.

They were good days. I was born in the eighties, but in my country I did not have a computer. I entered these interviews to see the people who owned at that time and their impression of the regime.

I'm lop the hhhhhhhh

I transform into a crow. Obviously.

I do not know about Linus' finances (nor do I want to know), but I can almost guarantee that Bill Gates has more money.

Linus has told me that he would not start a kernel project today. Instead he would learn how to program an FPGA.

I love in the whole open source community, that you can share your knowledge for free. And even technical books are quite cheap. This is one rease why I love Linux. Linus did not "hold back" his knowledge.

it turns out that the battery runs out

The kernel was (should be) one of the simplest programs in the system. At the time there were different paradigms floating around on the approach to take in designing a kernel. From what I understand there were multiple attempts (by different groups) to do this and the result was a series of separate programs working introspectively to make the system work. OTOH Linux is monolithic, one program that performs all operations under a single hood. The whole GNU system was a joint effort by many groups of people, you can't single handedely slate RMS for it.

@@Newtube_Channel rms is a gifted programmer, but a complete and utter f*cktard.

Should have chosen something like pop os or mint or ubuntu

There were many people trying to negotiate licenses with AT&T about that time. I think you might admit that Sun was a bit more successful.

@@penguinnh I am just trying to set the record straight. Bob Marsh and Kip Myers’ influence in those days is underrated.

I have been hearing that "AI is almost here" for the past fifty years, but I have a relatively large expectation of "real AI". Quantum computers? I am glad I am retiring.

The discussion of micro kernels vs modern monolithic kernels (with loadable device drivers and loadable kernel modules) is a long discussion over many beers.

Peter Paul Chato When Apple makes an OS that requires T2 chip will you drop your silly hackintoshing and join the Linux community? ;)

@@jjwachter82 Prophet John, is that you?

Most of it is drivers.

More like 20 million lines

Indeed once you have established the foundations of a system, the system takes a life of its own by becoming abstract. You can then build in modules as and when you see fit. These are the device drivers.

The kernel is complex for many reasons, but you can get an idea of "shoving functionality out of the kernel" by looking at the number of system calls vs the number of APIs in the libraries. What if all the library functionality was moved into the kernel.

Probashly.

Microsoft was first to have x86 Unix Xenix which later was sold to SCO

Try as I might, I could not get Solaris-86 to install. When I gave up on that I installed Linux. The only hard parts were audio driver and the Xfree86 modline. Once those were figured out, it was rock solid stable. I thank Mark Knopper for pioneering device autodetection.

This is long so skip. Coherant & SCO cost too much and BSDI were battling AT&T. I really wanted to make my PC in 1992 access memory like old Atari ST did. My Atari at home with no issue could see 4MB of memory. Here I was station in Okinawa had saved up for year to get PC 8MB of memory, on the PC I had to use QEMM-386, HighMem.sys to see the 8MB of memory in the IBM PC with dos and Windows 3.x. I had Mark William C compliers and Basic on the Atari , no such luck with the PC, I bought Borland Turbo C. Then I head about Linux, download Slackware did my floppies. Had linux up and running all the tools I need plus a complier for free and learn everything i could about monitor and had X windows ruing, sound compiled Kernel. No basic but Perl filled that void. Atari ST Basic (GFA BASIC much better)allowed for making windows and you could do the same with TC/TK. At work I had SYStem V, Xenix and Solaris. A little more work and got LPD working and printed out Zen and the Art of the internet. Unix System V user's guide Then into 1993 The Linux Document Project was under way and you Had the Linux System Admin Guide, Network Admin and the How to. The LDP made the phrase Read the Fine Manual Nice. Then if you had to buy a book it Was O'Reilly. In very strange way I got into Linux because I could do much more things with my Old AtariST ,MegaST and Amiga computers than with the IBM PC made years later. it was Linux that made the IBM PC clone into a true Personal Computer .

@Curt Howland: Microsoft ported Windows NT 3.x to the DEC Alpha, but it was NOT 64-bit, is was 32-bit. They intended to develop Windows NT 64-bit, but the project was scrapped. They also had a 32-bit port of Windows NT to the 64-bit MIPS R4xxx chip and a 32-bit port to the PowerPC. When the 64-bit PowerPC came out, Microsoft had already dropped all other ports beside the Intel 32-bit one. The next time Microsoft started going 64-bit, was in 2003 with the Intel Itanium chip (IA-64) and later in 2005 with the AMD X86_64 and Intel's x64.

@@bwzes03 I believe that the first 64-,bit address space Windows system was VISTA.

My website is called ARMdevices.net and we are doing this Interview at the prime Linux on ARM Linaro conference. And there are more than 25-30 Billion ARM processors shipped every year. Sorry for mentioning it!

Hello Doug! Nice to hear from you again!