Re: [LI] Re: [ilug-blr] Re: Times of India articles

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 19, 1999 at 08:31:48PM +0530, Gurunandan R. Bhat wrote:
> I was in TIFR just before this happened and we took the kernel sources,
> but thought that the future was elsewhere. We thought that that the future
> was in making DOS a 32-bit OS (protected mode, not real mode;
> multi-tasking, but not multi-user).

What amazes me when we look back in history is that 386BSD was already
around at that point (1992) and quite well understood. It was probably in the
same state as Linux was in 1994-95, except for a wide range of PC 
hardware support. So had you checked out 386BSD in 1992, I'm sure you'd
have seen the light then, rather than a couple of years later.

At this point, BSD was very popular in American universities and most
techies knew it quite well. Much of the internet was developed on BSD.

As many Free UNIX historians will tell you, Linus and Co cared about the
end users and took actions - specifically, supporting a wide range of 
obscure PC hardware - that helped make Linux very wide spread. The BSD 
guys didn't care about the end users and saw it as a tool for hard core
techies. Plus, BSD didn't have a good story to tell which began with 
'In 1991, a graduate student in Finland....'

Part of the problem was the lack of information in India. I came across Linux
as an undergraduate student in 1993. It was brought to my school (REC Surathkal)
on 40 floppies from IIT Bombay. One of the first things I did after getting
access to the box was to read the GNU manifesto and was instantly impressed.

However, till I left India in 1994, I loved DOS/Turbo/Borland stuff and
hated UNIX. But ever since I first got access to a Digital UNIX box (my
brother was working for DEC then) connected to the internet, there was no 
turning back.

	-Arun

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