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From: Greg Roelofs <newt@pobox.com>
Subject: Five Years Later:  Is LINUX obsolete?
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Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 03:01:28 GMT
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Let me preface this message by saying that in no way do I intend
disrespect to those quoted below; rather, it's an amusing reminder
that even the brightest and most experienced among us can be just
a wee bit off when it comes to predicting the future.

                            --------------

Five years ago today, in article <12615@star.cs.vu.nl>, Andy Tanenbaum
(ast@cs.vu.nl) wrote in response to Linus Torvalds:

> Making software free, but only for folks with enough money to buy first
> class hardware is an interesting concept.  Of course 5 years from now
> that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running
> free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.

Amusingly enough, the "free GNU" that people are running on their
(now-outdated) SS5's is, in fact, Linux--thanks in large part to the
efforts of folks like David S. Miller.  In fact, Richard Stallman is
on record claiming that Linux should really be called "GNU/Linux" or
some such, but that's a whole 'nother topic...

> 2. PORTABILITY
> Once upon a time there was the 4004 CPU.  When it grew up it became an
> 8008.  Then it underwent plastic surgery and became the 8080.  It begat
> the 8086, which begat the 8088, which begat the 80286, which begat the
> 80386, which begat the 80486, and so on unto the N-th generation.  In
> the meantime, RISC chips happened, and some of them are running at over
> 100 MIPS.  Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years.
> These things are not going to suddenly vanish.  What is going to happen
> is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line.  They will
> run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software.

Well, we all know what a success the Alpha, UltraSPARC and PA-RISC are
in the consumer market.  The amusing thing here is that, loosely speaking,
Andy wasn't that far off:  what really happened, as far as I understand
it, is that the other Andy started borrowing some ideas--and, in the case
of HP, actual engineers and technology--from the RISC world and incorpor-
ated them into the Pentium, PPro, and P7/P78/P8 (which I always mix up).
Software emulation on a 167MHz Ultra can't really compete with hardware
"emulation" on a 200MHz, 200 BogoMIPS Pentium Pro, and Intel doesn't seem
to be slowing down...

> MINIX was designed to be reasonably portable, and has been ported from the
> Intel line to the 680x0 (Atari, Amiga, Macintosh), SPARC, and NS32016.
> LINUX is tied fairly closely to the 80x86.  Not the way to go.

Everyone can agree with that.  Linux has now been ported from Intel to
Atari, Amiga, (Power)Mac, SPARC, Alpha, and maybe MIPS and 8086.  Nobody
much talks about the National Semi chip anymore.

                            --------------

In a subsequent message, Andy wrote:

> Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second 'F' for
> this term.  But if you do real well on the final exam, you can still
> pass the course.

This gets into the religious arena, I guess, but in retrospect I would
argue that Linus deserves an A+ for ignoring the 286 and its predecessors
(for which Andy castigated him in a previous message).  If today's multi-
architecture, multi-processing kernel can be considered the final exam,
then I'd give him at least an A-, I think.  (The minus would be for the
somewhat primitive 2.0.x SMP support, but that's being addressed in the
2.1.x kernels right now.)

                            --------------

Finally, one of Linus's responses included this statistic:

>> Full sources for linux currently runs to about 200kB compressed

My, how we've grown...  It's up to 6MB these days, and that's using
gzip (which didn't exist five years ago).  I suspect a compress'd 
version would be 8 or 9MB.  Yow.

                            --------------

If I had a bigger ego I'd make my own predictions now, but I'm not
feeling *that* silly today.  I will simply hope that Linux isn't
obsolete five years hence, either. :-)

(Follow-ups directed to comp.os.linux.misc only, btw.)

--
Greg Roelofs            newt@pobox.com            http://pobox.com/~newt/
Newtware, Info-ZIP, PNG Group, U Chicago, Philips Research, ...        
