Hacker News Reader

Comment by earthscienceman | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love articles like this that humanize the creation of such a megalithic thing. It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends. I love it.

I think it would be hard to overstate the impact of Linux and free software. I do climate science research and its pretty obvious that every single paper that contains an important finding was built on FOSS. Latex, Linux, python, all the gnu tools, and so much more. Imagine being a researcher who needed to write any of that, or pay for all of that, in order to work. It's incredible. Thanks to everyone who codes, builds, or contributes to such projects.

Also, it's laughable how little that is recognized in the science community.

View on HN

   >> One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector starting with "ATDT" and the university modem-pool phone number. After recovering from this, he implemented file permissions in his kernel.

Now this nugget made my day. I love Finnish deadpan humor.

Reminds me of how I nuked my first Linux drive. I was using the cthugha[1] music visualizer app. You had to pass in a CD-ROM device as well as a DSP device (long before ALSA existed). Instead of the DSP I probably passed in my hard drive. Whoops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)

I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun. I spent many hours back in the day just using bash scripting to make sound, I never got things good enough to make any worthwhile music but I did enjoy myself. Never accidentally specified /dev/hda instead of dsp but I did once do rm -r /usr instead of ./usr, switched to always using absolute paths for such things after that.

> I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun.

I usually spawn "aplay" and pipe audio data into stdin, like it was a file.

use play from sox.

I've actually seen a rare case where a rebooting machine with messed up DMA tables managed to deliver incoming network packets to the hard drive, corrupting it. It took a bunch of really smart people a long time to figure that out.

I literally laughed aloud about 1992 being the year of Linux on the desktop.

Everything is a file! :-D

Yes, but the "I recommend this installation method" bit is slightly better :)

dropped by to comment the exact same thing. good ole' /dev/*. make sure you're sending bytes to the correct one!

It's also endearing that the Linux kernel was rooted in "A"/"B" testing. :)

> It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends.

The modern world is underpinned by such discoveries--very accidental or curious types that go on to change the world and impact a lot of people.

To quote a Steve Job's line: "I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being" [0]

[0]: https://putsomethingback.stevejobsarchive.com/

Absolutely. But also, as a species, we're such a fan of these narratives that lionize people like Steve jobs. A brief article written by a friend about a project from their college years is much more humanizing than anything I've read about Steve Jobs. Sure, there's the "garage beginnings" part of the story but even that is very much lionized as "grind and hustle".

I think the way the myth of Steve Jobs and his impact on the world is a great example to juxtapose against Linus\Linux in so many ways. Linux runs nearly everything and was given away for free and the broader public is totally unaware. Steve Jobs sells hardware and constantly played up the lion narrative as a push to make money and be important. Im more interested in the former than the lot.

Inflammatory comment? Maybe. But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.

> But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.

Thank you for expressing that, I agree wholeheartedly. There's this increasing sentiment that everything is a product - something many people on HN are responsible for promoting. Where once was humility, there's now opportunism: Terminal emulator? Meet subscription service. In an industry defined by it's ability to generate hype cycles and profit off them, there's something brilliant and refreshing about FOSS and it's culture.

Steve Jobs got the private jet and the flashy keynotes, but Linus Torvalds is undoubtedly the bigger rockstar.

Same with Woz, the actual brains behind Apple. Jobs was just a charismatic designer and salesman.

Woz had nothing to do with saving Apple in the 90s - and nothing for nearly 40 years - the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with in the late 90s. He was clearly smart enough to figure out how to save Apple. That’s more than “just” being a designer. 3 predecessors couldn’t figure it out and Gil Amelio wasn’t an idiot (Spindler wasn’t an idiot either - but oof talk about being out of your element)

The Apple of Wozniak is a historical footnote. Apple of today is NeXT - Jobs’ company.

A company doesn’t just succeed on technical prowess which is more where Woz’s skills lay. Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless. Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.

> the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with

It's fair to say that success can be attributed to the Apple II, which without Woz wouldn't exist. Yes, he did not make the iPod - but he bolstered Steve when his technical council was empty and was content doing so for next-to-nothing. There's no need to belittle his actions, obviously nothing he did competed with the work Jobs was doing. The two operated in their own lanes.

> Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless.

I mean, I agree. Suffice to say that Steve Jobs could have never turned in his first Atari contract if Woz didn't do the work for him, though.

Yep, Apple needed them both. The Apple II was there early, but by the mid-80's it was very overpriced for its capabilities, compared to the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bits. It needed Jobs' marketing abilities.

Late 80's and 90's Apple survived purely because of marketing. Both Commodore and Atari had them beat technically, with the Amiga and ST. Remember, both of those could emulate the Mac and were half the price.

I remember them, and I have to tell you the Commodore and Atari 68k machines were not obvious winners. Ugly software, ugly hardware. I know this isn’t what fans of those machines want to hear, but Apple’s design aesthetic blew them and the PC away; Apple was simply in another league.

Late 80’s Macs had the best user experience available. Again, this isn’t a popular take, but it is absolutely true. “Apple’s marketing prowess is what sold them” is bullshit; Apple was better at selling, but not so much better that it could overcome perceivably middle of the road products. Apple’s industrial and UI design led the industry. Everybody else followed.

You are, of course, right. Apple's UI was better. I was primarily an Amiga user, but also had a friend with an Atari ST around that time, and both their desktops were kinda ugly. Amiga got more professional looking with 2.0, but still no match for the Mac in terms of usability.

Cray Research allegedly spent $0 on marketing and, if true, sort of did succeed directly because of technical prowess.

And they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and were bought for a file sale price by SGI (I think Cray could have used some high quality market research in the 80s.)

yes, after 24 years of operations, during most of which they had a monopoly on the world's fastest computers

No matter that subject, we all get hung up on the notion of forever, versus effective duration of use case of creations.

> Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.

Nah, you really think so?! Just because he was probably the most successful business leader in his generation you think he was smarter than us, HN commenters, despite our incredible feats like foreseeing the DropBox fiasco, predicting the LISP AI revival and so many others?

What leads you to such outrageous conclusion?

Kind of odd generalizing 'smart'. People have different skill sets and it's pointless comparing eg dev skills with marketing skills.

Imo, Jobs was good at making hype, that was his skill set and he was undoubtedly good at it. Woz, Torvalds, have very different skill sets from his but it's apples to oranges.

The brains behind the hardware and software of the Apple II - a remarkable accomplishment, to be sure, but even there, the marketing and packaging that Jobs contributed was not nothing. And Woz contributed nothing whatsoever to the Mac, let alone the iPod, the iPhone, or the products that came later.

Woz left pretty much no traces on contemporary Apple. Jobs is all over the place (and, if anything, it's Tim Cook who is the underrated contributor). And for all the narrative of Woz as the unsung hero, he parlayed his fame and wealth into an impressive string of failed products, up to and including a blockchain (which, I think, is still a going concern).

"Just" heh. Jobs is arguably one of the best product people in history.

I think some of this is because people don't have the same freedom to tinker with things for fun or altruism without a profit motive, because life is so much more unaffordable now. Generations Y, Z and α are all struggling to just survive let alone potentially retire.

Well surely there has to be a better moneymaking plot than desecrating FOSS. But generally I agree, I suppose.

I think most of these opinion threads about Steve Jobs should be unhooked and connected to a root thread that points to Walter Isaacson's biography. It's painfully obvious most people haven't read it.

What makes it so obvious folks haven't read it?

Why do you consider it a more trustworthy source than others?

“all he did was hype” is a sure indicator that they don’t understand what Steve Jobs actually did

“Becoming Steve Jobs” is the book to read. Isaacson’s book is terrible.

Steve Jobs was one of the greatest marketers in recent history, and from that perspective he really was "totally dependent on them for [his] life and well-being".

Others did the work going from zero to one, he did the work of going from one to a hundred.

The first ones put in an infinity units of effort and received maybe N units of recognition for it.

Jobs put in 100 units of effort and received N billion units of recognition for it.

While I do agree with you on the effort assessment, or certainly the "trailblazing" factor... (to me, writing a kernel and operating system that could be used by the entire world before there existed a notion of what that kernel and operating system might look do that is infinitely more impressive than being a salesman)

.. I do think it's a red herring. To me it's not so much about effort than it is impact. If every person to ever write code was trying to sell a product, progress would have halted as it started. It's both the effort, the philosophy, and the philanthropy of it. Which is also what has made it thankless-ish.

Jobs figured out how to collect and amplify the efforts of talented people into a industrial organization with products that have had a world-changing impact.

I don't know how much of that is his talents and efforts and how much of that is luck of being with teams that succeeded at a time when industries he chose were rising. I wouldn't discount either the possibility that he was distinctly good and industrious... or that dozens/hundreds/thousands of people of equal distinctiveness didn't make it for arbitrary reasons. And anybody who isn't sure the rewards are equitably distributed is probably correct.

But I do recognize that functioning in such a way that you can effectively collect and amplify the efforts of talented people is a non-trivial feat.

Popular recognition is usually balanced out by resentment and envy.

For Jobs? No way, that ratio is 100:1.

The worst part is that he was a horrible human being. Much worse than Wozniak and probably even slightly worse than Gates.

This & open source give me hope in humankind. Almost drop a tear reading the article.

While I agree with everything said and celebrate the availability of open source tooling for just about anything, there's an indictment in here that the possibility of researchers paying for tools they need to work is relegated to the realms of imagination.

I think I get your sentiment, but what I think is the funny part is that when you PAY for apple HW/SW you are not allowed to use it as tools, instead it's locked down.

I gave up on iOS devices a few years ago when they forbid things like 'wifi scanner' on iOS. A tool I used regularly to install and measure the quality of WiFi network/coverage.

I just love the success Linus had with managing this gigantic project while not using means of SCRUM or any of the other fancy words and systems! Sure he might not always be the friendliest but I just can not imagine Linux being successful today if it followed any of today's modern software-dev-methodologies like scrum.

I just love my linux-workhorse-daily-driver :) Thanks Linus and everyone else who had a hand in my awesome Linux desktop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com