Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 11:18:40 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Re[2]: Tiny starter configuration for FreeBSD Message-ID: <20011101111840.B6434@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <008101c162a3$429a8a20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 11:03:07PM -0800 References: <005701c161f5$88800e60$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <008101c162a3$429a8a20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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> > >Why must people become so emotionally attached to an operating system? > This is quite an interesting question. I worked as a System's Programmer in a University in the days of the 6th Edition of Unix, when the source was distributed and the only licensing restriction I recall of significance was the use of it for Document publishing, and probably a no-liability clause for the brain-damage you might suffer from working out how many back-slashes to put in an nroff macro. We did huge mounts of work on the kernel, fixed drivers, wrote drivers, working out a careful layout of the system on the disk - my boss re-wrote the disk driver to allow you to write a file-system backwards for efficiency reasons ! We had a network of PDP 11/44's and later Vaxes, all connected by a Cambridge Ring (if anyone has ever heard of that) with shared disk access, I even wrote a file transfer system that would propogate files across the network through the shared disks..eek..it got top marks in what was known as the "aardvaark" test, the transference of the spelling dictionary from one machine to another (aardvaark being the first word in the dictionary at the time). The point of saying this is that with the source of the system a couple of things happen. Firstly people get very interested in writing software for the system because they have real access to it, and people get very creative with it, and develop a sense of ownership, a sense you can never have with a closed book system. Coming from a background in Dec RSX11M, Unix was a revelation to me. I think all of these factors are at work with Open Sourced systems, whether it be a hobbyist at home, or someone trying to write a driver to do this or that, or make a system more stable, or scaleable (I will keep out of the NT versus Unix debate, but scaleability is one thing NT *is* lacking). Of course some systems are better at one job than another. Since the Windows9X system is presumably dead after Windows ME, and Microsoft systems become more expensive, perhaps the desktop world of Open systems is at a point in history where it can step in. Well, just rambling :) -- Regards Cliff To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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