What's that "GNU/Linux" in the beginning?

What's that "GNU/Linux" in the beginning?

Posted Jan 5, 2007 20:13 UTC (Fri) by landley (subscriber, #6789)
In reply to: What's that "GNU/Linux" in the beginning? by grouch
Parent article: The Ultimate Distro (Linux Journal)

Interesting juxtaposition, but the connection he's trying to suggest by
it isn't really there. "Just for Fun" goes into a lot more detail, such
as the fact that the system call reference he used to implement his
system call list was the SunOS manuals in his university library. (And
nobody calls it Sun/Linux.) The working Unix systems he had lying around
were Minix and the university's MicroVax he dialed into to access the
internet. (And you'll notice Linux grew out of his terminal program for
dialing into that MicroVax, he wrote the term program to boot from a
floppy because Minix's serial handling couldn't even keep up with 2400
baud without dropping characters, and he had to take over all the
hardware himself to get his home PC to talk to the university machine.)

You might also want to read the first year of the linux kernel
mailing list (which was pretty low traffic back then). Back when I did
that, I bookmarked a bunch of posts I found interesting when I read
through it, and strung the posts together into two files:

http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1991.html
http://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/1992.html

What packages are mentioned? Several minix files, the mtools package
(from isc, not fsf), X11 is a pervasive early goal (since that's the big
thing minix just couldn't do). In 1992 mentions of gnu tools start
showing up, but the emacs he used was microemacs and version 0.12
included pmake from bsd. The first networking support was through the
KA9Q package.

Kernel development being driven by running real applications doesn't have
anything to do with gnu. This is not mere opinion, I've been researching
computer history for years. http://landley.net/history/mirror

Rob

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