On Thursday 20 January 2022 at 17:24:46, Peter Duffy wrote:

> On Sun, 2022-01-16 at 04:12 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E
>
> Thanks for the link to that - brilliant talk. I've always thought that
> Brian Kernighan himself was the great communicator in the UNIX group - I
> wonder whether "The C Programming Language" and "The Unix Programming
> Environment" would have happened without his obvious ability to take
> abstruse and difficult material and make it accessible.
>
> If I had one incredibly tiny nit to pick, it would be that he didn't
> mention GNU (it appeared once in the slide showing Linus' original
> email). Without GNU, it's reasonable to suppose that linux wouldn't have
> happened.

I disagree with "it's reasonable to suppose that".

Linus Torvalds was building a system for himself, partly (I believe) because
he liked Unix but couldn't afford a Unix system of his own, and therefore he
was of course going to build it using as much free (of charge) software as he
could.

That meant GNU.

I think the Unix philosophy and design principles are beautiful, and formed
the basis of an amazingly efficient system, but some of those principles are
embodied in Linux and some are embodied in GNU (for example, devices as files,
and pipes, in the first; and tools such as tr, cut, grep in the second), so
these days we can't really separate the two - Linux is nothing without GNU
(although the reverse is not true).


Antony.

--
Douglas was one of those writers who honourably failed to get anywhere with
'weekending'. It put a premium on people who could write things that lasted
thirty seconds, and Douglas was incapable of writing a single sentence that
lasted less than thirty seconds.

- Geoffrey Perkins, about Douglas Adams

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