Linux Scale Talk Feedback & Corrections
In 2024, I gave a talk at the Southern California Linux Expo on Linux history. This is the feedback page.
- Video of the talk
- The talk as an article. A combined slide deck + script
- Google slides slide-deck of talk
- The script of the talk
- I also have over 25 videos on how the sausage was made that documents all the efforts on youtube
The Google slides and doc links are commenter links so feel free to comment there if this page seems broken. You can also do so on Youtube as well.
This page is under the umbrella of a larger project, Silicon Folklore with currently one completed article. If you have seen the talk, there's two other candidates here. The project in general is about the process of myth-building in the tech world and trying to carefully untangle how the myths started. In 2022, I wrote Was the internet designed to survive a nuclear attack? and I should probably be more diligent about writing more. Here's the candidates:
- USL v. BSDI lawsuit - this one is kind of touchy, I used FreeBSD for 20 years, gave donations to Net, Free & Open and really like NetBSD so I'm not trying to be snippety. In fact, if I ever get tasked with teaching operating systems, the NetBSD kernel would be what I'd choose. However, I contend the USL lawsuit is ultimately irrelevant. I guess this talk demonstrates why by going over the relevant matters, but it was also seen contemporaneously as differently than it's being depicted historically.
- Pre-Microsoft "free" software - there's a "hole" in the history of computers. Essentially, the naratives are like this: Charles Babbage & Lady Lovelace, Alan Turing defeating the Nazis, giant IBM mainframes of the 1950s, going to the moon, JCR Linklider and Engelbart, Apple, Atari, & Microsoft and then from about 1975, it's fairly verbose. What's given short shrift is commercial computing before the rise of microcomputing. I've been studying it since around 2015 and a lot of it is still microfische and library closed-stack based. But as a result, a lot of funny stories have been told about that era that need to be addressed.
Anyway, that's enough chatting from me. You've got things to say as well.