With a new and improved look.

 

Greetings my fellow Open Sourcers, if you are currently reading this on Issuu, you are getting a glimpse of a new look for OSANN, one of easier reading I hope, but I do have some words to say. As of late, much of the OSANN Staff has been dangerously pre-occupied, PMF has had to quit because of his grandfather’s death. Yoinkinator is overworked, Chronopolice is currently in the middle of a natural disaster. I hope you realize this when you see the size of the newsletter.

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Yoinkinator

            Linux has progressed through many stages, in fact, when it first began, it was nothing like what we now know and love.

 

            In fact, when the UNIX project was first started, UNIX was intentionally made super expensive, to ensure the middle and lower class could not afford them, in fact, and some might consider the original UNIX developers, bigots. As the general public caught wisp of this expensive OS, one that was considered by many to be better than DOS or the Apple’s Mac, they were becoming angry that they could not achieve this standard. When all hope seem lost, the general public saw hope in Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the creator of MINIX, an OS similar in design to UNIX, but built from scratch Tanenbaum created this OS because he wanted his students to see and feel the inner workings and frame work of an OS, the original was created for the Intel 8086 microprocessors that seemed to have flooded the world market.

            Although MINIX was far, far from perfect, any one could get a hold on the Source Code by simply buying his book, ‘Operating Systems: Designs and Implementations’ which contained the 12,000 lines of code, written in C.

            One of those students that had managed to get hold of this book was Linus Torvalds. Linus was captivated by the MINIX system, and the new GNU Project. As a self taught hacker, he was extremely short handed on professional grade software for his hacking projects, among his other ideas. The GNU (Actually a reverse acronym for ‘GNU is Not Unix’) Project greatly advanced the ideas and capabilities of programmers and other computer “nerds” everywhere.

            The GNU Kernel ‘HURD’ was set to come out in a few years, but Linus was not about to wait that long.

                        In August 25, 1991 the historic post was sent to the MINIX news group by Linus.....

 

Linus himself doubted his creation’s success, but sure enough, in September 1991, Linux 0.01 launched. Curiosity peeked, Source Code’s were downloaded, tweaked and sent back, and on October 5^th, Linux 0.02 was released.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Message-ID: <1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your
needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)
As I mentioned a month(?)ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has
finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be depending on
what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is  just version 0.02 (+1 (very
small) patch already), but I've successfully run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.
Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi (128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux.
The directory also contains some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux
(bash, update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel source is provided, as no minix code has been
used. Library sources are only partially free, so that cannot be distributed currently. The system is able to compile
"as-is" and has been known to work. Heh. Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can be found at the
same place in /pub/gnu.

 

Over the next few months, Linux was re-coded, enhanced and made better and better. By December it was in 0.10 versions, but still only supported AT disks. But sure enough, after months and years of tweaking, the LINUX was ready to play the big game of ‘Ice Fishing’. Linus was actually commented on by Tanenbaum,

            "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 was deeply hurt by this comment, after all, he was the famous professor, but Linus failed to stop, he continued his development of LINUX, even after Tanenbaum’s other comment “LINUX is obsolete”

Linus wasn’t too affected, backed by his strong community, he delivered the following comment:

            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)

            Linus continued his work, soon backed by hundreds of thousands, armies of Computer programmers, Software Engineers, together, they attracted commercial vendors. Linux itself was free, Red Hat, Caldera, and companies of similar attributes compiled Linux with other free products and perfected them. The Linux community was also responsible for the famous user interface systems of Debian, GNOME, and KDE.

            Linux soon was spread to everything from PC’s, to Palm Pilots. In short, Linux had become a monolithic success, temporarily overshadowing Microsoft, Mac, and Linus’ former hero’s creation, UNIX; MINIX.

            After years of people getting into deep relationships with LINUX, those who were wary of using LINUX in office buildings and for more classified reasons, LINUX proved itself after the Love Bug known as “CIH” went around in 1999.

            As of now, LINUX is the running OS on the world’s largest Super Computer, and is also the fastest. LINUX has a growing fan base, with its extremely easy ability to retrieve programs, by simply using the App-store like program retrieval tool, or using simple terminal commands, everything you need is at your fingertips with Linux.

 

 

 

 

 

OSA Stats

Netjr’s report on OSA’s current standing.

 

              Hello, this is Netjr here with the end-of-the-Month report! Let’s get down to business:

General Charts

Land, Tech, Aircraft, Nukes, Anarchy, Tanks, Cruise, Navy, War, Peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Wars

Elitanthrace                                       MoLoMex

Ruler: donrobbery                               Ruler: JadeMAlliance      Tech Raid, Peace Sent

Open Source Alliance                           None                                  Peace Declared

 

The Republic of Bob                             battletopia

Ruler: steveo299065                            Ruler: jokerjkm        A general dispute

Open Source Alliance                           None                                   War Expired

 

 

OSU Report

Students' Passed Since September 1st: 12 Students

Recruits

30 Recruits Were Brought In

 

How to become a member of OSANN