;
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
c. Confrontation & Development
Soon Linus faced some confrontation from none other than Andrew Tanenbaum,
the great teacher who wrote MINIX. In a post to Linus, Tanenbaum commented:
" I still maintain the point that
designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error.?Be
thankful you are not my
student. You would
not get a high grade for such a design :-)"
(Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus
Torvalds)
Linus later admitted that it was the worst point of his development
of Linux. Tanenbaum was certainly the famous professor, and anything he
said certainly mattered. But he was wrong with Linux, for Linus was one
stubborn guy who won't admit defeat.
Tanenbaum also remarked that : "Linux is obsolete".
Now was the turn for the new Linux generation. Backed by the strong
Linux community, Linus gave a reply to Tanenbaum which seems to be most
fitting:
Your job is being a professor
and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse
for some of the brain-damages
of minix.
(Linus Torvalds to Andrew
Tanenbaum)
And work went on. Soon more than a hundred people joined the Linux camp.
Then thousands. Then hundreds of thousands. This was no longer a hackers
toy. Powered by a plethora of programs from the GNU project, Linux was
ready for the actual showdown. It was licensed under GNU General Public
License, thus ensuring that the source codes will be free for all to copy,
study and to change. Students and computer programmers grabbed it.
Soon, commercial vendors moved in. Linux itself was, and is free. What
the vendors did was to compile up various software and gather them in a
distributable format, more like the other operating systems with which
people were more familiar. Red Hat , Caldera, Debian, and some other companies
gained substantial amount of response from the users worldwide. With the
new Graphical User Interfaces (like X-windows, KDE) the Linux distributions
became very popular.
Meanwhile, there were amazing things happening with Linux. Engineers
have tweaked Linux to run 3Com's handheld PalmPilot computer. Red Hat Software's
version of Linux won the 1996 award for bestdesktop computer operating
system from trade
magazine InfoWorld. In April that year researchers at Los Alamos National
Laboratory used Linux to run 68 PCs as a single parallel processing machine
to simulate atomic shock waves.The do-it-yourself supercomputer cost only
$152,000, including labor (connecting the 68 PCs with cables)-about one
tenth the price of a comparable commercial machine. It reached a??
peak speed of 19 billion calculations per second, making it the 315th most
powerful supercomputer in the world. Three months later it still didn't
have to be rebooted.
The best thing about Linux today is the fanatic following it commands.
Whenever a new piece of hardware is out, Linux kernel is tweaked to take
advantage of it. For example, within weeks after the introduction of Intel
Xeon?Microprocessor, Linux kernel was tweaked and was ready for it.
It has also been adapted for use in Alpha, Mac, PowerPC, and even for palmtops,
a feat which is hardly matched by any other operating system. And it continues
its journey into the new millenium, with the same enthusiasm that started
one fine day back in 1991.
As for Linus, he remains a simple man. Unlike Bill Gates, he is not
a billionaire. Having completed studies, he moved to USA and landed a job
at Transmeta Corporation. Recently married, he is the proud father of a
girl, Patricia Miranda Torvalds. But he remains as the world's most favorite
and most famous programmer to this date. Revered by Computer communities
worldwide, Linus is by far the most popular programmer on this planet.
He deserves it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Epilogue 2000
The year 2000 started as the beginning of a new century, and of course,
a brand new millenium. With the ever increasing popularity of Linux sky-rocketing
to new heights, it was clear that Linux was to stay as an inevitable part
of computing in the 3rd Millenium. And the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds
also created headlines when his company Transmeta Corporation delivered
the ultimate result of their secret product, the amazing Crusoe(TM) processor.
Linus worked from the beginning as a project member, and the resultant
Crusoe processor is another testimony to his remarkable abilities as a
dreamer. One thing is clear, The Future Belongs To Linux!
This article is copyrighted by Ragib
Hasan (1999+). Any part of this article can be reproduced in any form
with prior permission of the author which can be obtained for FREE
by e-mailing him. Please feel encouraged to spread the spirit of the open source
software movement.
For all mistakes and suggestions
Contact me:
Ragib Hasan,
Department of Computer Science & Engineering,
Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
mail me at ragibhasan@yahoo.com
