> After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter "A" on the screen, the other "B"; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel.
Reminds me of: "Gall’s Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time."
I owe so much to Linux and the whole free software movement, as a self-taught programmer. I set up my first Linux computer in late 1995 - it was a laptop with 4 mb of memory (which wasn't much even then) running Slackware that I'd downloaded over a modem over the course of several days.
It was so cool to realize I could examine and modify the source code for... all of it! And interact with the people who had written all of it. I was hooked. I'm still using Linux as my primary development system these days.
I recall a friend installing Slackware about this timeframe (1995), where you could select which packages you wanted. We missed groff. As a result we didn't have man pages, had no idea how to fix it, and ended up doing a re-install. I miss those days.
Reminds me of: "Gall’s Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time."
I owe so much to Linux and the whole free software movement, as a self-taught programmer. I set up my first Linux computer in late 1995 - it was a laptop with 4 mb of memory (which wasn't much even then) running Slackware that I'd downloaded over a modem over the course of several days.
It was so cool to realize I could examine and modify the source code for... all of it! And interact with the people who had written all of it. I was hooked. I'm still using Linux as my primary development system these days.