Writing
Tagged “history”
22 articles
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When the Cathedral Ate the Bazaar: How Corporate Power Consumed Open Source
Eric Raymond predicted the open bazaar would beat the corporate cathedral. For a while it did. Then the cathedral bought the stalls. How acquisitions, license changes and platform lock-in reshaped open source, what the…
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From Licenses to Liberation
I started out on Banyan VINES, NetWare and Windows NT, and came to Linux in 1996 to get out of a licensing problem. A look back at how Linux grew from a workaround into the thing everything runs on, what's still weak…
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The History of Ethernet
A memo at Xerox PARC in 1973 described a network that shared a single cable and politely retried when two computers talked at once. Fifty years later Ethernet runs from your desk to the AI data centers at 800 gigabits…
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Gentoo Linux
Gentoo compiles everything from source, optimized for your machine, and for a few years in the early 2000s it was the coolest distribution around. It never became mainstream, and its culture is a cautionary tale about…
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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The first Linux distributions appeared in 1992 because installing Linux by hand was brutal. A few are still with us more than thirty years later, a few changed everything and vanished, and a few are footnotes. The…
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Debian turns 31!
On August 16, 1993, a Purdue student named Ian Murdock announced a new Linux distribution built in the open by volunteers. Thirty-one years later Debian is the foundation of Ubuntu, Mint, Raspberry Pi OS, Kali and…
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The Rise and Fall of Networking Giants
Wang, Banyan and Novell each owned a piece of the office computer before the internet. Each was beaten not by a better product but by a shift in what everyone else had standardized on. How they rose, why they fell, and…
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Who is DARPA?
A small Pentagon agency with no labs of its own funded the beginnings of the internet, Unix's networking, self-driving cars and the voice assistant in your phone. How DARPA works, what it actually built (and what it…
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The Legacy of Early Microprocessors
Last month Zilog took its last orders for the standalone Z80, a chip designed in 1976 and still in production nearly fifty years later. The Z80, the 6502, the 8086 and 8088, and the Motorola 68000 built the personal…
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The History of Open Source
Software started out free because nobody thought to sell it. Then it became property, then a movement fought to make it free again, and then the movement won so thoroughly that the companies it fought now run on it. A…
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The Evolution of Semiconductor Giants
Eight engineers walked out on William Shockley in 1957, and almost every chip company that matters descends from that walk-out or from a man who spent 25 years at Texas Instruments. How Fairchild, TI, Intel, AMD and…
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Understanding Foobar, Foo, Bar, Baz, Qux, and Quux in Programming and Linux
Every programmer learns foo and bar before they learn what they mean. Where the words came from (a 1930s comic strip, Second World War slang and an MIT model railroad club), what comes after quux, what other countries…