Benevolent Dictatorship
Harvey J. Stein
hjstein@bfr.co.il
20 Mar 1998 20:41:07 +0300
kragen@pobox.com (Kragen) writes:
> On Thu, 19 Mar 1998, Gavin E. Gleason wrote:
> > Maybe we should use some sort of parlimentary procedure, and have
> > an elected chairman. We could put motions on the table as to the
> > steps as they become pertinent. Then we could vote as to which
> > would be the best way to continue.
>
> I suggest another way: a sort of economy, like Linux.
Some more Linux history to give people an idea of how things
proceeded, - functionality, who controlled what, and the time frame
involved (from
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~thies/Linux/Time_Line.html):
Linux Time Line
Unknown Dates - Please Help
July 3, 1991
some device drivers, and the hard drive are now working; some basic
user-level features are now being considered
August 25, 1991
v0.01 is almost ready; MMU used for paging (not to disk yet) and
segmentation, pseudo ttys, BSD sockets, user-mode filesystem, window
size in the tty structure, systems calls are capable of supporting POSIX.1
and BSD-style filenames
September 1991
Linux v0.01: no binaries are available yet, only source code; a small
filesystem exists, along with a working disk-driver
October 5, 1991
Linux v0.02: The first "official" version of Linux was announced. This
version was able to run bash, gcc, gnu-make, gnu-sed, and compress.
This version was not very usable.
October 26, 1991
Linux v0.03: This version of Linux was considered usable.
November, 1991
Linux v0.10
December 19, 1991
Linux v0.11: This was the first stand-alone version of Linux. There was
still no SCSI support, although there were people working on it. Hardware
setup for this version consisted of ISA+AT-disk. No init/login yet either,
you would get bash as root upon bootup (standard in the next release as
well). Partially working VM (paging to disk), but 4M was needed to be
able to run the GNU binaries, especially gcc. Bootup was possible with
only 2M, but you could not compile.
December (Xmas) 1991
Linux v0.11+VM: Several people were trying to compile the kernel with
2M and failing, hence this version was made available to this small group
of individuals that wanted to test it out.
January 5, 1992
Linux v0.12: This was the first version of Linux to contain
"non-essential" features. This was also the first version that Linus
allowed any money to change hands due to Linux. Previously Linux had
been distributed free, under a very lenient copyright owned by Linus. This
previous copyright had actually been much more restrictive than the
GNU copyright.
March 1992
Linux v0.95
April 1992
Linux v0.96: This version of Linux was capable of running X-Windows
August 7, 1992
I (Jonathan Magid) take over Linux archives from Alan Clegg and move
them to sunsite.unc.edu. They had been at banjo.mcnc.org. The load on
the machine was too great (according to his boss) as it was transfering 37
megabytes/day of Linux and 386BSD stuff per day.
September 15, 1992
Alan Clegg submits a proposal for file system standardization on behalf of
the Linux-Standards list.
October 18, 1992
Linux v0.98.2: This version contained a new FPU-emulator by Bill
Metzenthen. Bigger than the old one by Linus, but instead of only doing a
few of the most important instructions, it emulates the whole 387
instruction set. It was also much faster than the old emulator + the soft
math library. The new emulator made a separate soft-float library
unnecessary, which simplified GCC distribution a bit.
Minor memory management fixes: One of the minor fixes, the trapping of
kernel NULL dereferences, proved to break a lot code. This proved to be
very good, since many kernel or driver bugs showed up. Unfortunately,
v0.98.pl2 was not usable on many computers, since the kernel bugs creep
up too often.
SCSI driver changes by Eric Youngdale. Mostly bug-fixes.
Some TCP/IP patches. TCP/IP was still alpha, and had not been
extensively tested, and hence was not up to real use yet.
Psaux mouse patches by Dean Troyer.
Starting with this version, Linus will no longer made bootdisks. This task
was turned over to H.J. Lu and Jim Winstead.
October 19, 1992
Peter Williams announced a debugged version of ed, the Unix line editor,
courtesy of Bill Metzenthen. ed was used mostly by patch and shell
scripts. In the early days of Unix ed was used as the primary editor.
October 20, 1992
Peter MacDonald announced an update to SLS. It contained man pages
that were accidentally removed in a previous release.
David Black announced Pirates BBS v1.9 for Linux. It was a multiuser
bulletin board system. Working kernel TCP/IP was required, and 10M of
disk space was recommended.
Olaf Erb announced Wampes with Linux support. The announcement
didn't describe what it was.
Thomas Dunbar announced a port of GNU's free-standing info file
reader. This package allowed you to read the GNU on-line
documentation, instead of doing it from within GNU Emacs. Also included
were makeinfo and texindex, used for formatting info files from texinfo
source code.
October 21, 1992
Mark Becker, the author of RaWrite, announced a new version. The new
version was supposed to run on ``nearly everything claiming to be
compatible with the original IBM-PC''. RaWrite was an MS-DOS utility
that was used to write out disk images (e.i. bootdisks) onto floppies. Under
Linux the equivalent command is ``dd if=diskimage of=/dev/fd0'' (if you
want to write to the first floppy). It was not possible to just copy the floppy
image file to the floppy under MS-DOS, since that would require the
floppy to have the DOS filesystem on it, which means that the disk would
have extraneous stuff on it, not just the parts in the image file.
Larry Butler announced an upload of xv 2.21 binaries. There was trouble
with his first upload (compiled with debugging and hence very large
binaries), but that got fixed quickly.
October 23, 1992
Matthew Lewis announced an upload of dclock.
October 25, 1992
Thomas Losin announced tvgalib, a graphics library for Trident 8900C
cards. This was based on the vgalib library, which is for generic VGA.
Neither requires or has anything to do with X or other windowing
systems.
October 26, 1992
Qi Xia announced a new program cksum, a (mostly) POSIX conforming
checksum program (not compatible with Unix sum).
Vince Skahan announced an upload of Newspak v1.0. It was a package of
programs related to Usenet news ported to Linux. The included programs
were: C-news (12/22/91), tin (1.1pl4), trn (2.2), smail (3.1.28). Newspak
used programs from Mailpak (by Ed Carp), which provided uucp and mail
for Linux.
Thomas Dunbar announced TeX packaged as an SLS package.
October 27, 1992
Linux v0.98.3: This version corrected most of the kernel NULL pointer
reference problems.
November 7, 1992
Doug Evans releases his Xenix filesystem for Linux (98p3).
November 19, 1992
Fred Van Kampen releases: new enhanced version of Laurence
Culhane's Slip (original released when?) ports berkeley talk/d, ftp/d, rsh/d,
host, dig, telnetd, rlogind, uucpd, tftp/d, his own inetd and telnetd.
November 20, 1992
Ross Biro releases port of the BSD lpr suite.
November 1992
Andrew Tridgell releases an early version of a NetBios server. I believe
this is the pre-origin of the Samba server.
December 2, 1992
Jim Nance releases a program to let you install a linux system over the
network (the first one?).
February 1993
First port to non-intel systems (Amiga) begins. FAQ posted by Greg
Harp.
February 1993
van Kampen releases new Slip driver, using his new Device Driver
interface, to keep drivers from having to break layering (slip used to muck
in termio and serial layers).
April 1993
van Kampen releases Net-2, which replace Biro's original TCP/IP code.
The new version features: Net source layout, BSD-osh SIOCxxx ioctl
calls (more BSD programs port to linux), ifconfig allows bit-wide
netmasks and ip-routing, integrated Donald Beckers 8390 and plip
drivers, new SLIP driver, actual /dev devices for TCP/IP, hooks for new
IP router, improved ARP module.
May 1993
Phil Hughes announces plans for Linux Journal.
September 17, 1993
Alan Cox begins to take over networking as flamewars over Net-2 (van
Kempen) vs, Net-1 (Biro) rage. He removes much of the new code for
stability reasons and starts work on Net-2D (debugged).
September 21, 1993
Alan Cox releases Net-2D (debugged). This is a release to provide a
stable transition between Net-1 and Net-2.
November 29, 1993
First Alpha release of Umsdos FS, to allow running Linux from a
MS-DOS FAT partition.
December 1993
Linux v0.99.14
December 15, 1993
van Kempen releases Beta-3 of Net-2E, while Johannes Stille releases
his own passel of fixes to Beta-2.
January 18, 1994
Peter MacDonald (SLS) releases patches agains 99p4f to make most
device drivers loadable modules. This isn't the same module support that
the Linux kernel now supports, though.
February 5, 1994
Code Freeze for Linux v1.0
February 18, 1994
Daniel Quinlan releases 1.0 of the File System Standard.
February 26, 1994
Ted Ts'o announces an Alpha release of a full-rewrite of the Linux tty
driver. The two main new features: Allows new low-level drivers to be
written, eliminating hard-coded TTY major numbers. Line discipline
interfaces were revamped to speed TTY handling (speeding slip and ppp
greatly) (FFSTND), replacing Clegg's earlier work.
March 1994
Annoucement of foundation of Linux International. Its goals are: 1)
encourage as many people, organizations, and communities as possible to
start using Linux 2) promote the development and distribution of freely
available software.
April 5, 1994
First Alpha of iBCS2, which allows you to run SVr3 (including SCO) apps
under Linux.
April 16, 1994
Linux v1.0
May 1994
Alan Cox releases his Net-3, which is a partial re-write of Net-2. Cox
more or less takes of major development of the Linux networking from
van Kempen.
August 4, 1994
First Beta of Redhat ships.
November 3, 1994
First release of Redhat ships.
Linux v1.0 - v1.0.9
March 2, 1995
Linux v1.1
1995
Linux v1.1 - v1.1.95
August 2, 1995
Linux v1.2
1995
Linux v1.2 - v1.2.13
1995
Linux v1.2.8
June 6, 1996
Linux v1.3
1996
Linux v1.3 - (pre)v2.0.14
1996
Linux v1.3.59
1996
Linux v2.0
August 11, 1997
Linux v2.1
1997
Linux v2.1 - v2.1.49
Bibliography: Aaron Thies, Linus Torvalds, Lars Wirzenius ,Mark P. Nelson, J. Richard Sladkey, Jonathan
Magid
--
Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
hjstein@bfr.co.il