30 Years ago...

Posted Aug 26, 2021 0:18 UTC (Thu) by jmclnx (guest, #72456)
In reply to: 30 Years ago... by rgmoore
Parent article: 30 Years ago...

You are probably right, but I think it would have taking a lot longer to get to where we are now. IIRC hardware requirements for BSD back then required a lot more memory. So less requirements was probably also a factor with Linux. Memory was a lot more expensive then I believe.

Also I think the infighting that spawned the various BSDs may have slowed things down. But I wonder if we would be in a completely different world.

30 Years ago...

Posted Aug 26, 2021 3:13 UTC (Thu) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

I remember Alan Cox saying that whichever BSD he was interested in running initially required a 387. Linux didn't, so ...

Funny how Linus' aversion to floating point has served him well for 30 years :-)

30 Years ago...

Posted Aug 26, 2021 16:57 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

One of the hard things with hypotheticals like this is whether people would have made the same kinds of decisions in the alternate universe. Would BSD have been more willing to work with less expensive hardware had Linux not been available? Would the same kind of fragmentation happened with a bigger userbase, or could the problems with fragmentation been even bigger? It's possible that the different flavors of BSD would have learned to work together better, to the point that they behaved more like Linux distributions behave today. It's a really fascinating hypothetical.