And dual frontends will give nice redundancy.
The conventional science community approach is volunteer mirror sites. We could have many benefits of a CDN without the big recurring costs.
(I'm pretty sure my first linux kernel download was 1997, one of the 2.0-pre series, and it probably came from funet.fi)
My thinking is that it could be quite interesting to see how different people evolve the kernel - maybe some interesting ideas result.
Linus' monolithic kernel won out over Tanenbaum's microkernel, because it just worked. In the 1990s that was important.
Now we want it to work and not get totally pwned because we opened a sketchy email attachment before we had our coffee. Tanenbaum was right [1], but for the wrong reasons, and way too early.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
The release notes for 0.01 are here: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/R...
In my lifetime, I’ve gone through:
- building (as in: soldering chips to a motherboard) my own computer at home at age 11*
- buying an 8-bit Atari and learning about Antic and the 6502
- eventually getting a “disk drive” which stored an entire 128k
- moving onto a 32-bit cpu with the Atari ST
- blowing my student budget for the term on a hard disk, 20MB
- finally getting connected, at the blazing speed of 2048 baud
- lather, upgrade, rinse, repeat
- to where I have a 1gbit internet connection, a 10gbit home network, 100TB of storage locally, and a server rack in the garage with more than 100 “cores” available.
Things have changed so much, so quickly, relatively speaking.
My parents bought me a black-and-white TV and a computer kit (they couldn’t afford both the TV and the already-assembled version) for Xmas at age 11. The big gift here was the TV, as far as I was concerned, we only had the one downstairs before that, and I got one in my bedroom! I even convinced myself I could watch snooker on a black & white TV, even if you did have to tune it by turning a dial until the picture appeared :)
About a month later, they were getting at me to put the computer together, which was the main present in their eyes - the TV was second-hand. Grumbling, I did so, and got it working. Once I’d told them, the whole family wanted to see this new technological marvel, so I took it downstairs, plugged it into the main TV, and everyone gathered around.
I typed in what the manual had told me to do, to test things out
PRINT 2+2=4
It took me a few days to convince him that “1” was the right answer. To this day, I think his mistrust in computers stems from that episode. He was a docker in a Northern city, and all he’d say for years afterwards was “you can’t trust those bloody things” in ... more colourful... language.
Generally the PC sat in the corner and wasn’t really used. It had a SCSI card too, and when it was burning CDs it was left alone.
I remember one day a colleague of mine burnt 50 CDs so he could give them out after a -resentation, it was pretty damn reliable. I also used it as a mastering machine for a CD that I had professionally duplicated to sell, full of Atari ST shareware/public domain s/w.
These were very early days of Linux. I actually had already released the “Mint distribution kit” which let my beloved Atari ST work like the Unix machine I had at college, and this was before any sort of distribution for Linux (at the time, Slackware had yet to be released) was available. The MDK was quite popular, mainly amongst students I think, but of course paled into insignificance compared to what Linux/Slackware/all-the-rest would evolve into :)
I remember reading opinion polls from people who saw this rapid rate of progress in the 60s 70s 80s and they all assumed the 2000's would be this "flying cars everywhere" magical land.
It's also amusing how many people - my age or so - use Ubuntu as a daily driver these days that never went through the pain of configuring LILO or Broadcom drivers from source in Slackware ;)
I would turn out to be love at first sight. I've been using Linux since and I've been working at SUSE for 10 years this Fall.
The ISO standard is great for data exchange, but it's unlikely to change how dates are normally spoken and casually written.
My native format is mdy but I dislike it almost as much as dmy.
For server-side environments or to some extent Android, I can see those as reasons for companies to contribute patches but I'm not sure for the future of several individual distros which are still floating around today, even when I rarely switch between macOS and Ubuntu these days..
From the FAANMG group of companies: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Google all have employees signing off patches under their company emails and no-one should be surprised to see no contributions from Apple to the Linux kernel anyway.
SuSE invented LiveCD, AFAIR, years before Knoppix claims to be the first LiveCD Linux in the late 90s.
Yggdrasil Linux was earlier:
Curious, do you remember when user contributable/rolling package managers became popular? Back in 2000 when I wanted latest software, I remember having to resolve dependencies manually (view compile errors, then yahoo/google for libraries and errors). Each dependency had to be compiled manually, sometimes requiring patching code to get things to play nice. This was always a headache lol, but felt awesome once things actually compiled.
We did get some complaints from people who were convinced that selling Linux distributions was illegal ;).
I was a C.S. student at UNC-Wilmington when RedHat first launched, and I remember a lot of people were freaked out about that. They were just howling "they're SELLING Linux?!???!" Heh.
Especially interesting — there are some very cool CAD, GIS and graphics apps or MS-DOS, Windows (from 3.1 to XP).[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel
[1] ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Archived/simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/
Here are correct HTTPS link to Simtelnet mirror.[0]
Also just discovered that Simtelnet mirror on Sunet is more complete.[1]
[0] https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/Archived/simtel.net/pub...
[1] https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simteln...
I think my first functioning Linux install was Debian Sarge in maybe 2005. I remember the first time I got it to boot and it was just the command line that I had working, but it felt like freaking magic.
Those were the days too of Compiz and all that fun. It was mind blowing to realize that there was an alternative to Windows that not only looked fancier but had free access to things like compilers and interpreters. Definitely started me down the path to my current programming career.
The performance of the floppy drive was terrible at first- a friend of mine and I added buffering, so that it could read a track at a time instead of block at time (which caused it to read only one block per disk rotation).
For the same project my friend created the generic SCSI driver that still exists today. It allowed us to connect a medical film scanner to Linux.
For example a book of old maps dated to 1643.
I wonder if Linus had any idea of the impact his "toy project" would have on the world?
> It runs on a Linux server with dual 20 core processors, 786GB of memory and 80+TB of NetApp NFS storage. > It has a 2 x 25Gbit/s connection to the Funet backbone.