Oct 16, 2026, 7:54 PM@zzt But yes, the entire reason Linux became big was because the GNU Mach kernel project was in development hell, and then Linus posted a hobby project as part of a rebuttal to a debate with one of his professors that was Good Enough to make the GNU coreutils standalone. Hell, remember the original posting Linus made? He never wanted it to become big! But it did anyway and now we're all paying the price
Oct 16, 2026, 8:02 PM@zzt I might write a more detailed version of this later on tonight, no promises
Oct 16, 2026, 10:00 PM@zzt teaser for the thing I am writing:
"This resulted in Stallman taking the first draft of his unhinged plans to make a UNIX replacement and nailing them to the doors of the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups in September of 1983."
Oct 16, 2026, 10:18 PM@zzt another teaser, I love this line I wrote:
"apparently Berkeley pulling off a Ship of Theseus with the entire UNIX operating system really pissed off the phone company."
Oct 16, 2026, 10:18 PM@techokami ooh I like where this is going
Oct 16, 2026, 10:19 PM@zzt yeah I'm hitting the weird shit in UNIX history to talk about this one kid's hobby project
Oct 16, 2026, 10:20 PM
@techokami @zzt Which one? I've ripped into him a lot over the years...
Oct 16, 2026, 11:03 PM
@techokami @zzt The big draw with linux was that it ran on Intel 386s and so you could get a Unix workstation for half the price of Sun/DEC/SGI etc.
Oct 16, 2026, 11:20 PM@zzt dunno if you didn't see it but https://woof.tech/@techokami/117453095072801952 it is done
Oct 17, 2026, 10:36 AM@techokami ooh thank you! I’ll take a look today!
@techokami @zzt Andrew Tanenbaum right? I remember we had books from him for our systems courses in computer science.
Oct 16, 2026, 9:59 PM@workingclassgames @zzt Yeop! Andy made a academic-only UNIX clone that was part of the inspiration as well as part of Linus' coursework
@workingclassgames @techokami @zzt tanenbaum is cool as fuck amoeba is one of the five interesting OS designs ever made
Oct 16, 2026, 10:26 PM@hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @zzt if Minix wasn't licensed to be academic-only until the 2000s things would be much more different
shame nobody wants to revive Minix 3. Except Intel for their CPUs.
@techokami @hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @zzt what do you mean by "Intel for their CPUs"
Oct 17, 2026, 12:10 AM@techokami @hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @zzt oh right the obvious backdoor
Oct 17, 2026, 1:45 AM@aburka @hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @zzt it runs Minix 3
Every computer with an Intel CPU is running Minix
Andrew has won the war
@techokami @hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @zzt do we know why they chose minix, and not like yocto or whatever was the equivalent at the time
Oct 17, 2026, 1:54 AM@aburka @hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @zzt honestly only the people from Intel truly know
@techokami @hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @zzt yeah someone would have to give out some intel
@hipsterelectron @workingclassgames @techokami @zzt No way, Python was apparently developed for this OS first???
@theorangetheme @workingclassgames @techokami @zzt guido van rossum worked on it!!!