What would you like to see most in minix? (1991) | Hacker News Reader

What would you like to see most in minix? (1991)

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Reminds me of this guy writing a small web crawler in Java a couple of years ago:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...

I must admit: I had to Google "Lawrence Page". Didn't strike me that Larry is the diminutive for Lawrence :-)

edit: proof that he was successful, indeed, is that "to google" is a verb that comes more naturally to me when speaking English than common name diminutives.

"To google": English, meaning "to co-read with your personal security agent shadow. To add to your digital dossier."

>'"To google": English, meaning "to co-read with your personal security agent shadow. To add to your digital dossier."'

Can't we have one thread that doesn't get into this?

What other way to keep people thinking about it do we have?

Your entire post history is defending the NSA, snarky comments that add nothing such as '[citation needed]', and general negativity/patronizing 'well actually...' or 'I can't believe anyone...' type statements.

You haven't looked hard enough. I think you've ignored my recent comments about YAGNI and security, the follow-ups to those '[Citation Needed]' where I actually find a citation or ask for one, the one where I politely ask for direction about the entertainment industry, and the general plethora of material from a technical perspective.

Your reply also implies there's something wrong with NSA apology, which there shouldn't be intrinsically, as I'm posting an alternative perspective. Similarly, I don't subscribe to the idea that short comments or snarky comments are necessarily bad if they contain facts or point out a lack thereof - it's outright rudeness, willful stupidity/ignorance (reddit style humor), and meanness that I object to. Everything you've pointed out is stylistic.

Needless to say, this is all irrelevant, because my post history has nothing to do with my comment - that being, it'd be nice if we can talk about the early days of Google without demonizing it for its (alleged) privacy violations.

But, by all means, ignore my original point and look through my comment history for things to nitpick and argue over. I'm not going to debate it further with you.

Your reply also implies there's something wrong with NSA apology, which there shouldn't be intrinsically, as I'm posting an alternative perspective.

Holy carp.

I've always found it fascinating how language evolves with time.

Agreed that is off-topic, but I wrote this on Google and PRISM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124

I first thought why this is important. Then the first name Lawrence made sense to me.

I feel bad that I had to look up "lawrence page" as it just didn't click.

It didn't click when you saw "Larry Page" at the bottom of his post?

Who reads signatures anyways?

If you think about it, it is like an infinite loop. Someone asking about creating Google in a Google forum.

comp.lang.java isn't a "Google forum"... It's a USENET newsgroup that is now carried/mirrored by Google Groups.

You surely know this, but for clarity: it's a Usenet group. Google inherited a huge Usenet archive when they acquired Deja News and used it as the core of what eventually became Google Groups. But it was never a corporate-maintained forum. Usenet was always distributed.

Yes, I knew it :)

It's the most nostalgic form of recursion I have ever experienced!

The thing about nostalgic recursion is that it's never what it used to be.

Ha! Hadn't ever seen that before. I wonder if they ended up working around it, ignored it until it was fixed, or threw their hands in the air and re-wrote the bot in C++.

Legend has it that Urs Hölzle sorted out their Java problems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle#cite_note-1

Well, sort of and sorta not.

Page ended up working with another grad student (Scott Hassan, who later ended up founding eGroups, which later became Yahoo!Groups), who rewrote the whole thing in Python. Google's crawler and webserver were in Python until the Netscape deal (summer 1999). When Urs was hired as Google's first VP, he started transitioning the system to C and C++ to solve Python's performance problems. Java was introduced when Google hired some very skilled Java programmers during the 2001-2003 recession.

So yes, Urs sorted out Google's Java problems by not using Java.

Is there any good book about the history of Google? All the tech stuff like this seem really interesting!

Steven Levy's "In the Plex" is probably the best one. A lot of the stuff in my comment is mentioned there, and the rest is cobbled together from various presentations, blog posts, and Quora answers on the net.

Thanks. I will check it.

We really need a Pirates of Silicon Valley 2. Unbeknownst to the film's creators, the movie ended just as things got interesting :)

"In the plex" and "I'm feeling lucky" - both are very good and offer very different angles. As you can guess by the name first is more formal history whereas second are memoirs of a their marketing guy who has got a very good sense of humour :)

Another detail I've stumbled on is that Sam Rushing, a talented Python programmer, had something to do with Python in Google's early history: http://www.nightmare.com/~rushing/ .

He also worked at eGroups. He wrote "medusa" which became asyncore in the Python standard library (http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/). This was long before Java had async I/O. Interesting that Guido is working on the new async I/O interface "tulip" in the Python core after all these years!

And Larry Page's brother apparently also worked at eGroups.

They found better programmers who rewrote the whole thing from scratch. At least, according to the "In the Plex" book.

I feel like I've just seen the bigbang ...

Imagine being Joseph Millar!

I modern Linus-speak, I guess it would be:

"Hi minix fucktards, I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be retarded like gnu) for stupid 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like you to take your stupid feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things), print it on A4 paper, roll it and shove it up your ass.

I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something as practical as having to re-compile the kernel to use a new printer within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want so that I can insult a larger audience in less posts. Any suggestions are welcome, as I like to teach Finish swearing. "

Funny, though it is abundantly clear that you are not familiar with Linus's standard tone and vocabulary.

A Linus email doesn't typically make news unless it is vitriolic. You have a selection bias.

Agree!

It's called a joke.

Aren't jokes usually funny?

funniness is about the couple sender/receiver, not an intrinsic quality of the joke.

I found it funny (though I stopped using Linux some time ago, maybe that is the reason?)

You normally only hear jokes propagated if they're funny. You have a selection bias.

One type of the jokes derive their fun from an unexpected twist. The fun is the surprise.

Another type of jokes reaffirms what the listener already believe. The fun is the comfort of being proven socially right. This was the second type of joke. Those are obviously only funny to those who believe in the cliché the joke is using. As Homer Simpson put it "It's funny because it's true!"

(explaining jokes is not funny)

It's totally true, and even when it's vitriolic and in the news I would probably just read the title and skip the article.

Ah, some of them are very high quality though! Take this one for example:

  Ok, I have a better plan.

   - you learn to fly by flapping your arms fast enough
   - you then learn to pee burning gasoline
   - then, you fly around New York, setting everybody you see on fire, until 
     people make you emperor.

  Sounds like a good plan, no?

http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0506/5299.html

No matter how many times I read that, I always laugh.

I love Linus' followup to this later:

    On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 linux@horizon.com wrote:
    > 
    > > But perhaps slightly impractical.
    > 
    > There are just few laws of physics it violates.

    Yeah, yeah. You avoided a few laws of phsyics of your own.

    [...]

    My plan was more interesting, I feel.

http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0506/5308.html

Linus is actually a darned nice guy.

Until you push shitty code into his kernel.

One of the most enjoyable things about reading this that even in the first 3 usenet messages, Linus states engineering tradeoffs cleanly, simply and un-apologetically.

All qualities that Linus was to become famous (and infamous) for, before Linux was even fully formed.

There is something disturbing about people being able to comment on a historical thread like that years later.

Like someone scribbling on a precious museum artifact.

Eh maybe I am being silly.

agree. Those who replied "thanks" in the thread do not have any sense.

I'm not sure about that. Maybe Linus appreciated the encouragement. Depends on the person, but knowing that people like what you are doing can help motivate a hobby project.

They're talking about people who replied years later (i.e., today, apparently as a result of this post on HN or other sites).

in 50 years, someone link to that thread and point out "the inventor of cold fusion replied 'thanks linus' on the linux creation thread"

Not to be confused with Jeremy Allaire, who did not. :)

I believe that's why some forums have an archiving past a certain time of the last post.

Although, I believe that if there was something interesting going on in the newer comments you might not feel so disturbed about it.

That's probably the most unsettling thing. What were they thinking?!

"Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies"

The beginning of his verbal abuse seemed so innocent.

He has more in common with Bill Gates than he probably would like to admit (640k aught to be ...), yeah yeah, snopes. ;)

At least he didn't say "No one will ever need more than 64Mb/task"..

I've always been fascinated by "made it big" stories. It doesn't really matter which genre - every story is unique. From a band that goes from playing in dive bars to playing in arenas to a web startup like Facebook, it's interesting. And it's really cool to see things like this because it's history. Maybe it's also a reminder that you don't have to be a corporate team with focus groups and handsome funding to make something that people want.

Even if it's extremely unlikely, it still gives the same feelings that a vintage "Radiohead - playing tonight in Mickey's Beer Cave" poster inspires in a struggling band. They were in your shoes, and they made it big. Maybe you can too if you work hard enough. Sure, there was a lot of luck involved... but it's possible.

I'm impressed by how well received it was, right off the bat. The first couple responses include actual offers of help! Maybe it's just because there are so many new projects posted here regularly but it seems rare to see that mix of humbleness and enthusiasm present in the thread.

Yea, the typical HN response in often highly critical and even quite discouraging at times.

I would put it as downright hostile and exceptionally cynical actually. Critical would be fine in itself.

I once accidentally (by a third party) had an article of mine reach the front page of HN, and I was actually afraid of reading the comments. They were actually quite positive, which surprised me. That in itself seems like kind of a sad thing.

I was only six at the time, so I don't have first hand knowledge, but from what I gather there was no really free kernel/operating system at that time. Minix was under license restrictions, the BSDs was tied up in legal battles, and GNU was still on it's endless search for the perfect kernel.

Linux was sorely needed at the time!

The other thing to remember was Windows was still 16 bit at the time. Linux started off as 32bit. Being free was great, but I would have also (and did) payed for a 32 bit operating system at the time. I actually used OS/2 in the mid-90s before moving to Linux.

I can't stress enough how basic it was. Getting the kernel up and running was only 1/2 the battle. Getting X to run was a significant undertaking, and probably more difficult.

There were a number of PC Unix clones at the time, though most were relatively expensive (especially if this was just your hobby).

Eric S. Raymond maintained a buyers guide FAQ, though for some reason, he stopped maintaining it around 1994 ;-)

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt

Back then all the people that used Unix at work or school didn't really have a descent option for home use. Linux filled that void and came at a perfect time when a lot of the GNU utilities existed but without a completed open source kernel. Today, we see a lot of announcements for social sites and android apps that are a variation of a dozen other existing projects. It really is a different world now.

"just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"

Is there a bigger understatement in tech history? It certainly rivals Thomas Watson's alleged quote of the world market being "Approximately 5 computers".

When he said that, did he mean "for all eternity" or "in the next fiscal year"?

Oh, i don't know. He turned out 50% right.

If we think of PCs as terminals and clusters of servers as "one computer" it's not way far off.

I read the GP as referring to Linux being 50% right in the "big and professional" prediction.

If we take "Cloud" to mean "Computer" or rather "Disparate systems functioning as one", then he's almost right. How many people use AWS or Google Apps now?

If it's true that more and more services are moving to the cloud and this trend won't change, there may well be "Approximately 5 computers" some time in the future.

If we radically change the meaning of "right" then he's almost right. If right keeps its commonly accepted meaning then he's wrong.

Even if we accept that AWS and Google is each one computer, there's still the ~3 devices of an average techie (smartphone, tablet, one or more laptops or desktop computers), all of which are definitely computers and works fully independently, we're going to end up many orders of magnitude north of "5".

Linus made a post for the occasion on his G+ page: https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/Hy9pzJok...

I wonder if that post (or this post) will be around in 22 years (2035).

For those that like reading about these sorts of things, I highly recommend Just For Fun. It's a short book, but one I enjoy going back to every now and then to read.

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionar...

nice! just ordered a used copy =)

All the 386-specific stuff seems like an argument in favor of "do things that don't scale."

Very much so. So many of my side projects get derailed due to thinking about scaling. I tend not to do web projects so "scaling" in my context is usually along the lines of "hmm, if I put this language feature in my compiler (that nobody knows about or uses and doesn't even work) I'm going to have to support it for years."

Lame.

The "do things that don't scale" article helped knock me out of this rut a bit. I suspect I'll knock myself out the rest of the way the more I remind myself that pre-mature worries like this are actually an advanced form of procrastination.

My memory of 1990s Linux development is hazy (I was a young kid at the time), but my recollection is ~5 years after this post they paid a huge cost in effort to get it to work on Alpha, and after that the required effort to port to other stuff went down. So maybe it's more like "simple initial implementation, massive rewrite later".

Edit: Also worth noting that the 386 was the first "modern" Intel CPU in terms of instruction set and interfaces provided to kernel developers, so requiring 32-bit CPU with an MMU excludes a lot of machines in 1991 but not so many machines in the years that followed. What he's saying is he won't port to 286 which is a very obvious decision but maybe not so much if your frame of reference was Minix.

(Later on I do seem to remember there used to be a port of Linux to MMU-less varieties of 68K in the late 90s, like some of the other replies are asking for. Not sure how well it ever worked.)

A variant of Linux for CPUs without MMUs lives on as http://www.uclinux.org/.

Actually since about 2.6 uCLinux has been merged into the mainline kernel. Several MMU less targets are supported.

The problem with generalizations is that once you go looking for them, you find them everywhere. Not everything is an affirmation of yet another Paul Graham paradigm.

There is hardly anything more scalable than distributing a free software clone of a widely used OS over an open global network for cheap, incredibly popular, commodity hardware.

If anything, MINIX did not scale. They charged a fee, and free Unix clones took off leaving MINIX behind.

I think we need somebody to update the title every second or so...

Maybe that will keep moderators busy enough so that they won't have time to break^H^H^H^H^Hedit titles of other submissions. </sarcasm>

'improve' is the word you are looking for.

Sometimes titles are improved by moderator intervention--other times it's the opposite. Sometimes titles lose bias, but sometimes they become inaccurate or generic-to-the-point-of-madness.

I would argue that this title could be improved, quite a bit.

edit: The original title was "22 years 16 hours 48 minutes 25 seconds ago". It has now been improved (IMO).

Exactly,

""" 'improve' """

(with sarcasm quotes intact) is exactly the word many would use to describe moderation on HN.

Or to express it visually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Elías_García_Martíne...

Well, let's see

Won't support non AT-Disks

Not portable, and needs an MMU

Lame :)

And that's why CmdrTaco would rather have a Nomad

Imagine if Linux was built today the same way many contemporary startups are (particularly from a marketing perspective).

linux.io? Could work I guess.

Linux.io is a social operating system with a beautiful minimalist interface that allows you and those closest to you to interact with the computers that matter

Linux.io has been acquired by Yahoo, Inc. and will be shutting down effective October 1st, 2013.

Thanks guys, you made my day x)

linuxly, the social network/unlicensed taxi service for your 386 processor.

I have a hard time believing the authenticity of this, I didn't even see one insult or curse word.

Linus was good tempered back in those days. He still is, but he used to too.

I was expecting (incorrectly, I see now) that GP was referring to the other people in the thread -- why weren't they asking him why he was wasting his time on such a fucking stupid thing that no one ever needs?

For those unlucky souls who have yet to encounter the ingenious humor of Mitch Hedberg: this is a reference to the Mitch Hedberg quote that goes like this:

"I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too."

Other notables (pulled from his Wikipedia entry):

"I bought a $7 pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring."

"I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it."

"I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long."

"The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall."

Most of the curses are because someone decided to break the userspace. No one had beaked back compatibility at that point.

It'll be interesting to look back on StackOverflow posts one day to find little gems like this where users are trying to get help on what may become the next Google or Facebook.

What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

RMS, is that you? :)

How do I use the GNU pieces on my Motorola Photon?

Please read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.htm...

That link makes sense to me.

"Android contains Linux, but not GNU."

This quote from the article implies that it is not an error to refer to Linux without "GNU", since they are independent. In fact, it suggests that unconditional use of "GNU/Linux" are mistaken, since not all Linux implementations rely on GNU software.

That is indeed the case! See these two FAQ points[1][2]. Other examples include iPodLinux (remember those!) and TinyCoreLinux.

https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#justlinux https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#linuxsyswithoutgnu

Actually, mine is currently:

Linux(GPL)/Upstart(GPL)/GNU/X Window(MIT)/Gnome(LGPL)/XFCE(LGPL)/Python(PSFL)/Firefox(MPL)/Thunderbird(MPL)/VLC(LGPL)/*BSD/... say that five times fast. ;)

Of all the places to grind this ax, you'd pick the place where we're discussing Linus's historical announcement of his brand new kernel? A year before the word "Linux" was ever coined? In a discussion of a message where he talks about porting two specific GNU programs as evidence of how serious he is?

This is a common troll copypaste, I think originating at 4chan. It is unclear if Stallman ever said/wrote those words. Generally it starts with 'I'd just like to interject for a moment'

Edit: evidence that the first paragraph is real? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlD9UBTcSW4 (from http://www.reddit.com/r/gnu/comments/hv56g/source_of_the_fam...)

Stallman has been harping about GNU/Linux since the mid-90s at least. He gave me a hard time about it back in 1998 or so.

The first paragraph is unclear, but RMS actually wrote the second two paragraphs.[1]

[1] https://gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

It's hard to tell the deliberate trolls from the accidental ones sometimes.

I've had the misfortune to hear him give this spiel in person, it's real.

QOTD - "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"

I am guessing he was referring to the GNU OS, hurd. In retrospect this is quite funny considering hurd has yet to see a (production) release to this day. http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html

Well, he was probably referring to the Hurd, a kernel which was/is supposed to be the official kernel for GNU (not GNU OS btw). As Linux came with a GNU userland from the start and the discussion is specifically about the kernel it's hard to imagine he meant something else.

This is like what Caesar's bellum gallicum was to historians...

*De bello gallico

(or, if you prefer, "Commentarii de bello Gallico")

You. I like you.

This is never gonna take off.

Come back and post when you have a cutesy domain.

Excuse my ignorance, but how does a Google Group thread predate Google?

By acquiring Deja News, which was a Usenet web client.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News)

And more importantly: archive.

The discussions are from USENET.

Google acquired Deja News in 2001 which was an archive of USENET groups. It eventually became Google Groups.

They also greatly changed the way Deja News worked. Ruined it, if you asked people at the time.

It still does, try slrn and nntp.

The web interface part of it

Sure, but who uses that?

Lots of people did, back when their ISP didn't offer newsgroup access. Plus it had a great search interface and some other features I don't remember.

Fair enough.

They also took great care in collecting old magnetic tapes of historical netnews history that would have long been lost to bit rot history and restored gaps in DejaNews's archive. Google deserves a lot of credit for this.

DejaNews had ruined how DejaNews operated long before Google got its hands on it. By the end vast chunks of the archive had disappeared and then there was their bizarre and disastrous pivot into being a product recommendation/review site.

fascinating to look at the beginning of something that has become so huge. millions of phones run on a linux kernel, as well as all those tablets, pcs, and other random devices. i wonder if that email will ever go into a historic museum one day.

Not forgetting a vast amount of web servers..

https://plus.google.com/+Linux/posts/f96weYxzEu1

What would [not] happen if Minix was free...

That's a very humble first post...

Especially given,

> It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks

I've always wondered about the humbleness in that post. Whenever I talk about something I've created, I try to be humble about it. That said, inside, I'm of course wishing that it becomes the biggest bestest piece of software that (insert favorite large tech company you want to see collapse here) never saw coming and eventually rules the world. I can't help but wonder if Linus was thinking that at the time.

Reminds me of Alan Kay's attitude[1] in naming "Smalltalk":

The name was also a reaction against the "IndoEuropean god theory" where systems were named Zeus, Odin, and Thor, and hardly did anything. I figured that "Smalltalk" was so innocuous a label that if it ever did anything nice people would be pleasantly surprised.

[1] http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltal...

BSD sockets first feature request ever

That insistence on his operating system being NOT portable put a nice smile on my face.

Here is a timeline of big events in the past http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html

Sadly all of the links appear broken. Does anyone have an updated list anywhere?

This is really fascinating. I would love to read these through. If anyone has an updated list, or a way to translate that would be amazing.

Rack this up in the weird coincidence category. Saturday night me and an old buddy of mine were talking about EXACTLY this. The incarnation of LINUX.

> just a recompilation of the kernel

"just"

Inconceivable now, with out-of-the-box systems e.g. Ubuntu, but this was fairly common relatively recently.

Recompiling the Linux kernel is "inconceivable now"?

If anything, I wonder if it didn't take longer to recompile back then. I'm lucky to have 8 very bored cores to throw at the job. He didn't.

I compiled many FreeBSD kernels on a Pentium (no bloody Pro, II, III, or 4). That took long enough, but was several times faster than a 386.

Go ask someone running Ubuntu to recompile their kernel. 5 bucks says they don't know how. Hence, it would be inconceivable to them that everyone did it back in the day.

Actually, IMVHO, people still should run custom kernels because otherwise they turn into sissies who waste hours switching distributions every time they hit a driver bug.

I think a strong case for "regular" Linux users being able to build there own kernels is that while most users don't need or want a "bleeding edge" userland, they often want a bleeding edge kernel. For example, I use Debian Stable because I hate having inconsequential stuff change out from under me every 6 months, but I need up-to-date kernels for my hardware to work.

That is a niche (a large one I think) that is unfilled by the popular distros as far as I can tell.

I used to use Debian Stable.

In December 2002, Python 2.2 was released.

Seven months later, Debian 3.0 was released - with Python 2.1.

...time passes...

In November 2004, Python 2.4 is released. Debian stable is still using Python 2.1, and will continue with it up to June 2005.

June 2005, Debian stable finally upgrades off its 4+ year old Python version.

Needless to say, many 2.2+ scripts I ran in early 2005 broke on my Debian stable.

I understand that the late date of that particular Debian release was partially due to Ubuntu hiring away developers. I also understand that I could have always ran unstable. But it put me off of Debian stable.

Hmm, I can see that being a problem. Though I have a habit of avoiding distro-packaged interpreters/compilers anyway, even with Fedora, so that I'm always on the latest.

I built a new kernel yesterday. Modern distros streamline the task a great deal.

Yup, compiling and installing (in a distro-friendly manner that smoothly integrates with the rest of the system) your own kernel on Debian is almost trivial using "make-kpkg".

Most people don't have the need, of course, but if you do, it's not hard.

I have always thought of this as one of the best ways to start off a project. Be humble, ask for feedback, and share your work.

The guy creates Linux and Git. A true hero.

I think I remember reading him saying that git became popular because he created it. In other words due to hype.

That certainly may be one reason. Another reason may be that he understood the problem he was solving extremely well.

He's wrong.

What? I never knew that Linux & I were both born on August 26! (I'm older by a few years, though :)

Hey, it's my birthday too. Happy birthday!

Same to you, my friend. Although hpaavola above is stealing some of our joy :)

The date header of that message says it was sent 25th of August:

    Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT

Which happens to be my birthday, except I'm 8 years older. :)

Argggggh! Damn You!

Happy Birthday :)

You know you're young when you download a tarball and can find files with a timestamp older than you.

Yeah, especially that timestamp "31 Dec 1969" — seems to be all over the place.

I get people at work asking me about that on a weekly basis. I have the Picard facepalm printed in my cube.

Some people have to find operating systems with earlier epochs.

Nice find.

What?

This is a copy of the original post about Linux by Linus Torvalds, back when it was his toy pet project.

I gather. Is 22 years 16 hours 48 minutes 25 seconds significant in some way?

Years, hours, minutes, and seconds since that post.

Such a time interval is commonly referred to as 'birthday'.

Did you have a question?

Say what again

I dare you

I double-dare you, motherfucker

OT: That movie has so much violence I couldn't watch it all and it made me cry. Then you Americans wonder why there's so much crime in your country.

I don't know if it has anything to do with how violent our media is (I'm not convinced that watching violence makes one violent) but the fact that we've basically been at war for the last 30 years or so has really desensitized us to it, I feel.

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