Searching for Torvalds !

(Linus Benedict Torvalds :best known for initiating the development of the Linux Kernel)

All along my life, I wanted to learn about linux and its creators(note the plural here!) and this journey has been going on for sometime. Below, i would love to share with you, some search adventures, that i had today.

First, i headed on to Google groups, which is best place to find archived Usenet content dating back from 1981.

I knew, I had to search for author:linus but the next term, I was not so sure of. Suddenly, it came to my mind about the talks Andrew S Tannenbaum(author of the famous "Modern operating system" book and the creator of minix) and Linus torvalds had in the group. comp.os.minix . AST(Andrew S Tannenbaum) supported minix and Linus torvalds supported Linux(ofcourse!)

And I feel, these are one of the best technical stuff i have come across in the web about operating systems. It was really cool to read them. You can find a sample here > What would you like to see most in minix?

Man its really awesome to go through the lines esp :

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready

Just think, how this serious hobby has turn into. It sends shiver down one's spine.


So the next term to search was obvious. It had to be minix. A quick search on Google groups for "author:linus minix" (without quotes) got me what i was looking for.

Is MINIX much better than LINUX? posted in the comp.os.minix user group.

By clicking on the view profile, I was even able to check out, the first post Torvalds made in Usenet using the famous "helsinki.fi" email id he used to post in this group. Curiously though, the first post read like this(It was posted on May 29 1991 - yeah its some 16 years old !!)

Hello everybody.
I've got this problem with a old PC my sister just "inherited" (not from
me). It works ok, but much of the hard-disk shows unrecoverable
read-errors. I've marked them bad in the FAT by using PCTools, running
surface analysis over the nigt, but I'd rather try to LL-format the
drive while it's still relatively empty.

You can go through all the posts Linus and the Linux devlopers had posted in comp.os.minix during the early days of Linux creation and how various developers discussed and got it into this great endeavor.
Its really thrilling to see the mindset of the early adopters of linux including Linus Torvalds from these threads in the comp.os.minix .



Notes:

Various Usenet profiles , which i believe belongs to the linus torvalds. The first one really belongs to him

torva...@klaava.helsinki.fi Profile

torva...@osdl.org Profile

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