I have always been a history enthusiast. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about history in the context of computers. I am therefore interested in learning more about significant events and people like Richard stallman and all the related events such as Windows refund day. I am interested to read and explore the timeline, I suppose a book would be ideal but any good resource such as a youtube series would be great too.
Update: I am happy to recieve such wide variety of resources to explore, I hope this post might help someone who is interested in FOSS history in the future too.
I can recommend the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which I’ve read multiple times. I can also recommend Linus’ autobiography Just For Fun.
You can also consider The Cathedral and the Bazaar… though ESR can be a bit much.
That said, here are some random articles I’ve saved that you might be interested in:
Cuckoo’s Egg is a hacker true-crime from the 80s. Sorry no link. Lunch break.
There were some good pieces on Groklaw back in the day about the history of unix and Linux.
Can also recommend Just For Fun - that Finnish sense of humour doesn’t come across well, and while he’s good with English he certainly isn’t Shakespeare, but it does fly by.
History of Linux, abridged: Linus was using Minix on his own PC while at University, but was a bit fed up with its networking capabilities, so he’d written a toy operating system for a couple of his classes. While experimenting with adding features to it, he deleted his Minix partition by accident. Might as well continue with the one he’d written, since it was almost capable enough to be a daily driver. Publish the source, get a few collaborators in to add in the features that they found most useful, repeat. Boom.
It’s certainly older but Revolution OS is pretty thorough.
One thing I found annoying in that was Torvalds saying something along the lines of “think of Stallman as the philosopher and me as the engineer”. Yes, Stallman can be thought of as a “philosopher” but he is also an “engineer”, he wrote a hell of a lot of code for GNU, which wouldn’t exist without him anyways. It just seems like downplaying how important he was for the rise of this system.
Overall I think it’s good, though.
I think that has more to do with Stallman having a reputation for being a dick than anything else—people don’t like to give a lot of credit to people they don’t like very much.
I’ve never met Stallman though, so I can’t say what he’s like personally—I’m just going off what I read from bigger nerds than me.
He’s said some really sus shit and been accused of sexual harassment by several people. https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88. Even more sus is stallman’s multiple, passionate, defenses of pedophilia, and the very lukewarm walking back.
Don’t know of anything like that against Linus, at all.
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Great video. Our Linux Users Group will watch it every few years… it’s amazing to see how much has changed in 20 years.
I know you want to go deeper, but here’s a nice summary of linux’s early history: https://lwn.net/Articles/928581/
Read the GNU Manifesto. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
I think it gives a pretty good insight to what was going through Stallman’s mind when he kickstarted the GNU project and the software freedom movement. There are also footnotes added later to clarify some things (like the use of “free”)
This page might also be interesting to you. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html#gnu-history
There’s also a biography turned autobiography of Stallman. I think it’s called Free as in Freedom 2.0.
Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds is a good source. Very readable.
Check these out:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System (check channel for more)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DdoGPav3fc Computer Chronicles: Unix (search the channel for more related videos)
- https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-1/os-wars-part-1 The podcast series Command Line Heroes produced by Redhat includes many episodes that get into history related to Linux. Pick your way through the different seasons and pick out some episodes. Browse the companion site for supplemental material, for example, this post: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/linux-and-enduring-magic-unix
This old film by AT&T about UNIX is also very good and gives you a good idea of the OS/software landscape at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot.
GNU has interviews and more clarifying all the way back to MIT AI lab, lisp machines the printers proprietary code triggering free software movement, etc.
- https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/speeches-and-interviews.html
- https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html
Linux just happened because GNU hand’t developed a proper kernel yet; Linus wrote that himself on an mail to the Linux Kernel or Minix mailing list IIRC.
the git history tree for the Linux kernel
Doesn’t go back far enough
Lol that’s a pretty fun idea actually- just to see the commits evolve over time. I know there are over 1 million commits but yeah when you think about it all of them pretty much document the state of kernel at that time.
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