Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Warning - Read the First couple of Paragraph Before you Decide if You want To read The rest

[Rick Marshall <rjm zenucom com>]

*** NOT A FLAME ***

There's plenty of good history on Unix and normally I wouldn't bother, 
but I feel for the sake of a great man I should just correct one part of 
this (and yes I was almost there - a student of John Lyons at UNSW when 
all this was happening - so I have been a Unix/Linux user almost since 
day 1).

Unix was writeen by Ken Thompson so he could play a computer game - he 
was working at Bell labs at the time and needed to move the game to a 
pdp 8 (i think - maybe 10). Don't ask why he was paid to do this - it's 
part of the folk lore.

Dennis Ritchie wrote C which was used for the first portable version of 
Unix. It was the language after B or the second letter of BCPL ... i 
don't think anyone really remembers now.

There is a long history after that, many companies and many licences 
sold (including one to SCO). I think I used most of those early systems.

And before Linux there were many other pioneers - Bill Joy, Tanenbaum 
(author of Minix), Kernigan (standard C library), Bill Plauger, etc - 
and then came Linux.

Working in this environment is at times hard, but the standards are 
there and do work and careful coding leads to good portability. Working 
in windows is no harder or easier really and to this day I have code (as 
I'm sure do many others) that simply cannot be compiled to run under 
windows as it still lacks some core multitasking functions - that's an 
architecture problem which won't go away.

Rick

PS I think Ekiga is a great product too. Sadly all my friends use skype....

George Boyd wrote:

> This messages is very long if that bothers you delete it now. It is also
> not specifically dealing with Ekiga. However it directly affects it. And
> knowing the Linux community, I expect to get flamed even if you agree
> with me. If you want to flame me, then email me directly and keep it off
> the list. I know that sounds hypocritical since I am posting this to the
> list, but so be it. I need to vent. Damien is the only one that can
> flame me and I'll read it. All others will go into the garbage can.
>
> I have been using and playing with Linux since it was first released to
> the world. In 1963, I believe it was, Kernigan and Ritchie working for
> Bell labs developed Xenix, later to become Unix, for the sole purpose of
> having a means for engineers to be able to collaborate with each other.
> SCO picked it up and ended up being the "standard" for the Unix
> operating system which was easy to do because they were the only game in
> town. Then, Linus Travaldis (I hope I'm spelling his name correctly)
> comes along and presents us all with a remarkable concept of an
> exceptional beginning to a REAL operating system that was open source
> and free to all that wanted to continue developing on it. Through the
> years different groups decided to make their own packages ignoring any
> kind of standards. Then the war began. There was Slackware, BSD,
> Mandrake, Red Hat, etc. etc. In my opinion Red Hat came out on top
> because they were concerned about standards compliance and now there is
> Fedora which is within itself a very remarkable concept. But the
> problems still exist because developers are still having to work their
> tails off to support all of the different distributions, a daunting and
> nearly impossible task. 
>  
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