Hey everyone,
Another of the talks I went to at SCaLE 21x was called Linux and its Microcomputer Predecessors pre-1996 by Chris McKenzie. The talk was a bit hard for me to follow, but luckily the author of the talk has also put up an article version. I am not quite done with the article yet, but I think many of you will like it. As a warning: it is very, very detailed, so it is NOT a short read.
Video of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/live/AfrFsDN-WZ4?si=cPngR697ROVlx-Um&t=5907
The article version of the talk: How did Linux win the UNIX Wars?
If any of you find any mistakes in the article or the talk, you can submit them here:
So far, it has been a fascinating read. I had heard about the BSD court case be used as an explanation why Linux became much more popular than BSD, but these works suggest that is not the case. In particular, it seems that it was several factors.
- Linus happened to pick x86 architecture to work on his kernel. At the time, x86 was prohibitively expensive, but as we all know it became (and it still is) the dominate CPU architecture. Eventually, Linux became so popular that it was ported to other CPU architectures and dominated over the other Unix-like OSs on them as well.
- Linux initially appealed to “hackers”, which back then meant people who loved to hack things together on the system to get them to work. At first, everything they are doing takes a lot of work to even get the most basic things working, but as they improve on it, it becomes more and more usable for the average user.
- BSD was primarily used by researchers and professors. They were very experienced, and in some ways better at the hackers at fixing problems. However, if, for example, you have a new type of network card that is not working on BSD, well, these researchers have their own work to do so they probably won’t be able to get your problem. However, the hackers were happy to fix it, especially if there were more and more users with the same problem. This meant that over time, Linux became usable with more and more hardware. (I believe, from what I have heard of FreeBSD and NetBSD that this is still a problem, but I could be wrong).
- As more and more people use Linux, it begins to be adopted for business use. Sometime after being adopted for business use, it begins to be adopted by those same researchers and their peers. This is not to say BSD is never used for home, business or research use, but just that it became less common.
Let me know what you think!