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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a list of things that Europe used to have. Here's some counterpoints that you might be thinking of:

The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British. (Also has an ARM CPU, and often runs Linux, sometimes with a web server. Nifty!)

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And the other small hobbyist computing platform, Arduino, is Italian;

Python was created by a Dutch programmer;

PHP, the much maligned bastard language that still runs most of the web, was created by a Danish Canadian.

Even from his own examples, Ada and Pascal (as in Delphi) are still widely used, though probably in limited circles.

To add a few:

C# / TypeScript / Turbo Pascal / Delphi: Anders Hejlsberg had a lot of influence even though C# /TS are MSFT langs, and he is Danish

Haskell's GHC: _glasgow_ haskell compiler, Scotland

EDIT to clarify

Skype: founded by a Swede and a Dane, coded by Estonians. MySQL: a Finn and a Swede.

The web ? We had minitel in France.

And the first microcomputer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micral
I only found out about this because its inventor, André Truong, studied at EFREI at around the same time as Pol Pot. Fortunately, Truong was a much better engineer, and did something more constructive with his life.

But not the first personal computer, which was American:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1

Minitel wasn't really the same kind of thing as the Internet or the web.

However, arguably it was closer to where the Web seems to be going now.

Why ?

Because Minitel was a non-extensible (effectively) service run on centralized systems, whereas the Internet is defined by a heterogeneous mix of networks all collaborating to share traffic, any one of which can provide a completely new service at will, without coordinating with anyone else and, more importantly, without asking permission.

That is a totally non-helpful reply. A reply that actually gave some information would be more useful.

Hmm. Either I replied to the wrong post, or msla edited it. As it stands now, it is quite informative.

He edited it, but it's still false. In the minitel era, everyone could host a service, you had to get specific equipements, but it was easy to get. What was centralized, was the indexation, people had to know you phone number to dial in your service.

If you replace Minitel by internet, you describe it well too.

I just described how Minitel was completely different from the Internet.
I guess I don't understand your post.

You said the minitel is centralized which is false. Everyone could host it's service at home. Service discovery was centralized, but everyone could dial in your service if they knew your phone number.

> The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.
By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)
> The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.
The instruction set for the cpus originated in Britain (now japan), the cpu design is almost all based in the US (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Apple).
> The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).
The web was started by a Brit yes, the internet started long before in the US.
> Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British.
True

> > The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.
> By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)
When he moved to the USA Linux was already a popular OS, and he didn't move here in order to develop the kernel but to work for Transmeta.

> and he didn't move here in order to develop the kernel
He moved there and started the Linux foundation... what are you talking about?

Transmeta hired him, he moved, he liked it and stayed.

That's... not what happened. LF was formed by merging the FSG and OSDL. Only then did the combined entity have sufficient funding to hire Linus.

Nothing I said is in conflict with that.

He did not start the Linux Foundation.

The CPU implementation is done by Qualcomm, Apple, and the like. The CPU design is done by ARM, predominantly in the UK. The fact that Softbank (Japan) owns ARM has no bearing on where and who is doing the actual technical work.

Not true - just look at the latest chip from Apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13
Yes it uses the arm instruction set, but it was completely designed by Apple. This is identical to Intel using the same 64 bit instruction set as AMD... you wouldn’t say AMD designs intels chips though.

Apple is largely an exception in the crowd of ARM SoCs manufacturers, though. A lot of companies just implements ARM cores, with their additional magic in other bits of the SoCs. The fact that Apple does it does not mean that ARM does not do any design.

That's incorrect, Apple designs their own micro architecture that implements the ARM ISA. Qualcomm, HiSilicon, and Samsung use ARM's reference micro architectures, which are mostly designed in Austin TX now, although some have been from the ARM Sophia, France office. Samsung also made custom uarchs at their Austin office for their Exynos chips but recently shut the operation down.

Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple all license ARM designs. They're not the ones designing new ARM cores, they're licensing them. They're attaching all kinds of interesting other bits and bobs directly to those ARM cores, which is where their special sauce comes in. You can say the SOC design is all based in the US, but the CPU design is based in...wherever ARM does its CPU design. Which to be honest I don't know. :)
Maybe it's just pedantry since the SOCs are what has resulted in ARM taking over the mobile space (and also a big chunk of the embedded space. Your SSD and HDDs likely have multiple ARM cores).

> Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple all license ARM designs.
Not broadly true especially in the Apple case - Apple uses arm in the exact same way intel uses AMD. AMD created the 64 bit instruction set but it would be ridiculous to say intel isn’t designing their own processors. Similarly Apple designs all their own chips but use the ARM instruction set.

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