Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
Posted Aug 2, 2023 17:15 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view by paulj
Parent article: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
> That they didn't succeed against the PC is not an argument that the market would not have existed without the PC.
They would have existed. And they would have worked in the same fashion as smartphones worked: you only can run OS supplied with hardware and nothing else. Well, maybe community-made OS made specifically for this one, specific, device. If you are lucky.
> Why imagine it, when Acorn, Amiga, Atari, etc., existed and had such machines on the market (the Amiga 3000 with the MMU equipped 68030, the Archimedes).They still exist in some fashion. And that's how Linux would have existed in a world without PC: some kinda weird thingie used by some weirdos.
Similarly to how VAX “still exists today” or Genera “still exists today”.
People often wonder why we don't have common OS for all smartphones or all WiFi routers or all smart TVs… but that's natural state of affairs.
It's PC platform that's weird: you can actually take one single image and run Linux on devices from many vendors. Why do you think it works? Why do you think there are half-dozen RISC-V images ?
Posted Aug 2, 2023 21:09 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (1 responses)
In the early 1990s, Minix was available commercially for a variety of platforms including PCs and the Atari ST. It's true that Minix wasn't much of an operating system, but after all it is what Linus used to bootstrap Linux, so it wasn't entirely useless.
(IIRC Minix did work rather better on the Atari ST than on the PC (XT) because you had more RAM to play with, which in the absence of virtual memory was something of an advantage.)
Posted Aug 2, 2023 21:41 UTC (Wed)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
We had that on smartphones, too. I even remember few early Android games which would have different versions for HTC Dream, Nexus S and so on. At some point the zoo have grown so large that people stopped doing that and today most smartphones never get support for anything but what hardware manufacturer provides for them. Lack of that zoo is what made Linux viable and it's just pure luck that IBM lost control over IBM PC zoo precisely when it was passing from “programs talk to hardware directly thus hardware compatibility is required” to “hardware is now powerful enough to afford real OS”. DOS program were in wide use till XXI century and hardware manufacturers had to support compatibility all that time — and by the beginning of XXI century Linux was already established enough for server manufacturers to not ignore it (although they supported quite a zoo of different OSes back then, the important thing was that Linux was there already and no other free OSes were there, timing was critical for the viability of Linux).
Posted Aug 3, 2023 9:45 UTC (Thu)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
I mean, "Well, maybe community-made OS made specifically for this one, specific, device. If you are lucky." - you're describing Linux.
The luck here was Linus and the other hackers he attracted around Linux.
The i386 PC is an unimportant detail. *MANY* companies were racing to build affordable, commodity, capable, 32bit, MMU with paging, machines and get them out into the hands of the mass market. It was inevitable one or more of the *MANY* companies who _had long_ seen this opportunity and were _rushing_ to fulfil it would in fact _do what they were already trying to do_.
Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
And they would have worked in the same fashion as smartphones worked: you only can run OS supplied with hardware and nothing else. Well, maybe community-made OS made specifically for this one, specific, device.
Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view