In a longish post over at Dadhacker, Landon Dyer tells us the story, in florid language, of the moment that the Atari ST very nearly ran Unix. Not Linux, mind you, but real, AT&T Unix. The license at that time cost $10 per seat, which would have allowed Atari to sell a version of Unix to the general public and, if you extrapolate out a bit, would have made it a dominant end-user platform long… → Read More
The Linux Foundation recently conducted a survey to identify just how popular Linux is in the enterprise computing world. Traditional studies of OS popularity conducted by traditional analyst firms usually only count number of units sold. But with a free operating system you can’t reliably count units sold or installed. Instead, you need to ask a different set of questions, like “Are… → Read More
There have, historically, been two competing models of operating systems development. There’s the UNIX mentality, of small pieces loosely joined. That is, you have a whole bunch of little, stand-alone applications that all work together to accomplish more complex tasks running atop a svelte kernel that doesn’t know — or need to know — about the pieces its running. Then you have the “everything… → Read More
Generally speaking, 40 is considered “over the hill” in human beings. I’m 35, and as I get closer and closer to the crest of that hill, I can tell you with some certainty that the best is yet to come. I think the same holds true for operating systems. UNIX turns 40 this month. That’s right: it was four decades ago that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson worked in the AT&T Bell Labs on the… → Read More
In honor of Linux week, I’d like to talk about some distros I’ve known and loved. This isn’t an exhaustive list and many aren’t really distros, but it’s more an exercise in nostalgia than anything else. I’ve been loving *NIX since 1993 or so. That’s when I got my first shell account at Ohio State while I was still in high school. I didn’t realize… → Read More
Oh, how far the mighty have fallen. If you remember, SCO was patent trolling back in the day over UNIX and Linux. They sued a number of folks, including IBM, and then sunk into the muck of late, losing cash as it went. In short, they were suing everybody who looked at their code wrong, ensuring a steady stream of work for their in-house lawyers. Now, however, their hard work has paid off and… → Read More
Since 2003, SCO has been fighting bigger and bigger enemies in hopes of enforcing its UNIX patents. Well, a judge has just decided the SCO has no hold on UNIX patents and that Novell owns all of them. The graph you see here is what happened to their stock price when the news hit. SCO makes and sells nothing of any interest. Their M.O. thus far has been simple — enforce dubious patents on… → Read More
Not even a minute into this video and I was cracking up. It’s not even because he’s rapping (poorly) about UNIX-commands, it’s that this is the biggest display of geekism ever. The beats are not fresh, the bassist has a frickin’ music stand to read notes off of, and the keyboardist is wearing the most unfashionable glasses to date. Oh, and last time I checked, unless… → Read More
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