On Sun, Mar 29, 1998 at 04:06:46PM -0500, Steve "Stevers!" Coile wrote:
> Things change fast in the Linux community, and everyone who wants
> to have an impact HAS AN OPPORTUNITY TO, which is what makes Linux
> so exciting.
To expand on what Steve said (and I've said this elsewhere, so forgive
me if you've read this before), Unix was designed with the idea that
it would be a programmer's workbench. It would provide a multitude of
tools which could be rapidly combined to make meta-tools that did something
that neither tool could so alone. This is in contrast to OS's which integrate
everything -- in which, say, the equivalent of the Unix shell, utilities
and kernel are one monolithic unit. This approach works because it
allows users to combine tools in ways which were not anticipated by
their designers (using Visegrips and screwdriver as a hammer) which
is a difficult thing to do with all-in-one systems.
This is why Unix has been the birthplace of just about every bit
of technology that makes up the 'net. Examples: Usenet news, NNTP,
Mosaic (first GUI web browser), Kerberos, archie, gopher, Perl, tcl/tk,
HTML, HTTP, VRML, WAIS, IRC, NFS, SNMP, PGP, Java, LDAP, MIME, and
(while not the birthplace) most of the popularization and refinement
of TCP/IP, thanks to the CSRG at Berkeley.
Microsoft Windows has been the birthplace of "Bob".
So given this history, which now reaches back about two decades or so
to the point where Unix boxes were first getting plugged into networks,
it should be no surprise that Unix is still where the excitement is.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
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