[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 3:07:13 PM UTC+13, Dave Froble wrote:
> When Linux got started, there was no RedHat, and such. If people were 
> slow to use it, there was no company to go tits up. Only later did 
> companies embrace the OS, and pay people to work on it.

Before the world had heard of Red Hat, DEC itself was responsible for a rather crucial multi-thousand-dollar investment in Linux. Back in about 1995, one of its staff, a certain Jon “Maddog” Hall, was able to persuade his employer to ship a brand-new, expensive, cutting-edge Alpha machine all the way to a young Comp Sci student out in Helsinki, whom precious few people had heard of at that time.

By 1996, Linux for Alpha was stable enough to ship. That was only the second architecture on which Linus Torvalds had implemented his brainchild at that time; so Linux went portable at the same time as it went 64-bit.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s grandiose plans for its all-singing, all-dancing, next-generation “portable” OS, Windows NT, were only able to squeeze out a 32-bit Alpha port. Which didn’t last very long.