Let me jump in on this

@Aki his motivation was to learn the inner workings of his new computer at the time which was a 80386 better known as a 386 to some of us. He was a student at the time and some of his classes facinated him enough to spare a lot of his free time to do something useful. Making money was not on his mind at the time. So instead of him using his new found coding skills to write viruses or hack into the network, he figured He could get his program to run on a 386 and that was his motivation.

As a matter of fact, a lot of his initial code was considered bad (especially being C that just compounds things) and a lot of it could not compile too even on gcc which it was coded on. You could only run his S as an emulator on Minix and no other OS. Why wasnt it portable? The thing is he made sure he used all the gcc compiler directives (which were not supported by other compilers) making it not compilable unless you used GNU/gcc compiler. Why? Like I said he was "learning on the job" hence the need to practically test every directive written in the gcc manual. There used to be a lot of mails on usenet of him asking for help on how to do this and that and people would chip in.

So basically what he originally created was an OS emulator than run on Minix and that had not much commercial use at the time.

Quote "cheap replicas/imitations of propreitary or existing systems, am sure he would have wanted it to be different."

What Linux is today was not his intention it is simply a side effect of his hobby and efforts to teach himself more than what he learned in school.

2ndly you can censor the guy for making it close to what Minix was because it was the reference. Like I said he used to request source code of libraries and drivers other people ha done for minix so he could get an idea which is normal.



 
 

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From: "aki" <aki275@gmail.com>
To: "Skunkworks Mailing List" <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke>
Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2011 12:56:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Skunkworks] Did Linus really reverse engineer the Unix Kernel or did he add more innovative features to it?

@Joseph, your point is out of order in the context of this discussion. I clearly asked an opinion from those kenyans who are at kernel level not those who know how to google.

 

@Martin, @TheMburu,

 

nice write-ups. However, I'm not totally convinced.  Surely he knew that he was going down the road of cheap replicas/imitations of propreitary or existing systems, am sure he would have wanted it to be different.

 

What drove him and what was his motivation when he sat infront of a screen running a compiler? What were his thoughts because he must have suffered from the same mental blocks that am certain lot of coders suffer from ( i.e me included ). A coder and a mental block: You know what needs to be done, but you look at the screen with no commitment between the mind and keyboard. @TheMburu, what drove those guys you know to write for embedded systems? Money?

 

Some thots. :-)

 

 

 

**--Have you done any code today?--**

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