Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Linux Was Obsolete 30 Years Ago" video.

  1.  @ChristianConrad  "Aesthetical" is, however, not the word a native English speaker would use (or, at any rate, would have used in the 1990s). On the other hand, Torvalds' mastery of English as a third language puts the efforts of native English speakers to shame.
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  2. I thought OS/2 still survived in ATMs. And I once sold a whole (obsolete) external storage system to a guy who needed the cable for some business-critical piece of gear he was running.
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  3. I think the VAX was still big then. And, at least in business schools, IBM.
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  4. I know Linus Torvalds has a reputation, but if you compare that "flamefest" with historical controversies in scholarship or, especially, theology, it is no more than direct, with a /small/ side dish of snide. This also reminds us of a remark attributed to the great philosopher, Yogi Berra: "Prediction is hard, especially about the future." I was there at this time, even by an odd chance being on a committee that decided to buy the university a Silicon Graphics RISC/Unix machine (the engineers wanted to stay with VAX), and everybody /knew/ that RISC was the future. I guess the same was true about microkernels (BTW, isn't Mac OS or whatever they call it now a hybrid, at least?) It would be interesting to know how much Tannenbaum was wrong and knowably wrong, and how much it was sheer contingency? Intel at the time was making little chips for little machines--consider the dude complaining about the elitism of writing for a 32-bit chip--and it was not inevitable that they would win against MIPS or even Western Digital. But there was enough inertia behind the instruction set, and they were clever enough (and Moore's Law was still working) to change the way their chips worked.
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  5. Hey, I have a friend who runs Plan 9. I met him through a Latin reading group, so he evidently likes dead languages. But does OS/2 really belong in that group? I thought it was going quite nicely until killed by typical Microsoft perfidy.
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