I have always been a history enthusiast. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about history in the context of computers. I am therefore interested in learning more about significant events and people like Richard stallman and all the related events such as Windows refund day. I am interested to read and explore the timeline, I suppose a book would be ideal but any good resource such as a youtube series would be great too.
Update: I am happy to recieve such wide variety of resources to explore, I hope this post might help someone who is interested in FOSS history in the future too.
I can recommend the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which I’ve read multiple times. I can also recommend Linus’ autobiography Just For Fun.
You can also consider The Cathedral and the Bazaar… though ESR can be a bit much.
That said, here are some random articles I’ve saved that you might be interested in:
Cuckoo’s Egg is a hacker true-crime from the 80s. Sorry no link. Lunch break.
Can also recommend Just For Fun - that Finnish sense of humour doesn’t come across well, and while he’s good with English he certainly isn’t Shakespeare, but it does fly by.
History of Linux, abridged: Linus was using Minix on his own PC while at University, but was a bit fed up with its networking capabilities, so he’d written a toy operating system for a couple of his classes. While experimenting with adding features to it, he deleted his Minix partition by accident. Might as well continue with the one he’d written, since it was almost capable enough to be a daily driver. Publish the source, get a few collaborators in to add in the features that they found most useful, repeat. Boom.
There were some good pieces on Groklaw back in the day about the history of unix and Linux.
I know you want to go deeper, but here’s a nice summary of linux’s early history: https://lwn.net/Articles/928581/
Read the GNU Manifesto. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
I think it gives a pretty good insight to what was going through Stallman’s mind when he kickstarted the GNU project and the software freedom movement. There are also footnotes added later to clarify some things (like the use of “free”)
This page might also be interesting to you. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html#gnu-history
There’s also a biography turned autobiography of Stallman. I think it’s called Free as in Freedom 2.0.
This old film by AT&T about UNIX is also very good and gives you a good idea of the OS/software landscape at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
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Good bot.
Check these out:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System (check channel for more)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DdoGPav3fc Computer Chronicles: Unix (search the channel for more related videos)
- https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-1/os-wars-part-1 The podcast series Command Line Heroes produced by Redhat includes many episodes that get into history related to Linux. Pick your way through the different seasons and pick out some episodes. Browse the companion site for supplemental material, for example, this post: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/linux-and-enduring-magic-unix
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I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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GNU has interviews and more clarifying all the way back to MIT AI lab, lisp machines the printers proprietary code triggering free software movement, etc.
- https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/speeches-and-interviews.html
- https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html
Linux just happened because GNU hand’t developed a proper kernel yet; Linus wrote that himself on an mail to the Linux Kernel or Minix mailing list IIRC.
the git history tree for the Linux kernel
Doesn’t go back far enough
Lol that’s a pretty fun idea actually- just to see the commits evolve over time. I know there are over 1 million commits but yeah when you think about it all of them pretty much document the state of kernel at that time.
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