Translation of the article by the founder of Debian, Jan Murdoch, “How I Found myself in Linux”
Hello! On December 28, 2015, Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian project, passed away under rather strange circumstances. Somehow wandering around the web and figuring out the reasons for this very mysterious death, I came across Jan’s blog and post in it called “How I came to find Linux”. This text seemed to me very touching and interesting. Since I am not a programmer and not an artist, I decided to make a small contribution to the community by translating its text into Russian. I tried to make my translation at the same time as close as possible to the text, and, nevertheless, literary, readable. It turned out or not — to judge not me. The text itself, it seems to me, despite its small size and simplicity, is very important. It is important for understanding of that time, that pink era, the fruits of which we still use, be it iPhone, Android or VK.com (powered by Debian, as far as I know). At the end of the preface, I would like to give a practical meaning to my post. The fact is that I could not find a service for joint translation, which would be distinguished by simplicity and clarity in the main thing: in placing the English original and conveniently working together on the translation ideally, taking into account various options. Here I looked from the heels and did not find the right one. So I translated into google docs broken down into paragraph lines and two columns: original / translation. If you know this: write in the comments and, yes, do not judge strictly. Enjoy reading!
')
I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was a young student at Purdu University. At the time when I was still a student at the Kranner School of Management and my childhood love for computers was re-awakened by a compulsory programming course that I studied during the fall semester (we were given a choice of COBOL and FORTRAN, both of them even in 1992 seem to be very outdated - I chose COBOL because it seemed to be the more “working” of these two languages).
Ten years or more ago, my father, a professor of entomology at Purdu, changed his typewriter at work on an Apple II +. Believing that his nine-year-old son could benefit from this, he brought the computer home on a weekend with the Space Invaders game, which he had previously bought at the local ComputerLand store. I spent many hours at the computer that weekend. After that, I began to accompany my father to the laboratory whenever possible in order to spend as much time as possible at the computer.
As a nine-year-old, I was predictably fascinated at first by games, and this interest in games led me to my first meeting with programming: computer magazines published code samples for very simple games, which I, in turn, drove carefully at Apple, hoping, after hours of hard work, that I did not make a single mistake (Apple II, at least out of the box, offered a primitive line editor so that returning and making changes were very tedious, not to mention the luxury of finding mistakes).
Soon after, I met Lee Sadlow, staggering around the lab on weekends. Lee was one of Dad's graduates who began using Apple to help his experiments. Lee was always happy to explain to me what he was doing when I hung over his shoulder watching; his kindness was no doubt justified, at least in part, by the fact that the nine-year-old jerk who followed his every step was the offspring of the dean of his faculty. Without thinking about it, I admiringly looked at how he wrote out the code at Apple - the code that he invented himself, and did not write off from a computer magazine.
Between learning through learning source codes from computer magazines and random “lessons” from Lee, I soon began writing games and other simple programs, first on Applesoft BASIC, and later in 6502 assembly language. To encourage my growing interest, the father, ultimately, I bought an Apple IIe home and my computer hobby continued for several more years. However, when I became a teenager, the computer was gradually supplanted by more pressing things: such as baseball, music, and girls, and by the mid-1980s Apple began collecting dust in my dresser along with a collection of Hardy Boyz tales and Star Wars figures.
My passion for computers was dormant for the next half-dozen years until I was accidentally woken up during the COBOL language course in the fall of 1992. When the course ended, I naturally lost my account on the IBM 3090 mainframe, on which we performed tasks and laboratory work. Fortunately, as a student, I was attached to a personal account on one of the machines at the university computer center, either to IBM, or to one of the three Sequent Symmetry mini-computers running DYNIX, a version of the UNIX operating system. A friend convinced me that UNIX is more interesting and has a brighter future than IBM's VM / CMS, and I followed his advice and applied for access to one of the Sequent machines. The next week I was the proud owner of an account on sage.cc, complete with a generously generous disk space of 500 kb. (Yes, this is sarcasm, since 500 kb was a meager amount even for 1992. By the way, over time I found ways to get around this).
That winter, I had a wolfish appetite for UNIX. I spent most evenings in the basement of the math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of the Z-29 terminals, exploring every corner on the floors of the UNIX system. It was frighteningly quiet in those rooms with terminals where the only sound was the clack-clank-clan of several dozen keyboards and the occasional whisper like: “Hey, look at this ..”. Often, after the evening of discoveries, I walked out of the building along a long path, passing by the glass wall behind which the computer center kept its cars, gazing with trepidation at the Sequent Symmetry the size of a refrigerator, behind which I just worked, looking at the flashing lights and realizing that hundreds of people are still inside, even if only virtually, thanks to the sharing magic that technically advanced computers used to share their computing power among many users, creating the illusion that each of them is one native But most of all, I looked with envy at the system administrators who were cool enough to have the right to sit on the other side of the glass, endowed with the all-powerful power of the “superuser” in the system console.
Dissatisfied with the Z-29, I began scouring the campus at nightfall along with a friend Jason Balicki and the idea of finding something else. Jason was a participant in a scientific computer program for several years, so he knew where to look (although it was not without our contribution to science - it was partly entertainment - to enter buildings at night and pull the door handles, which computers could have, on the subject : are they open?
The best laboratories, as I found out, were in an engineering office building (referred to as unsuccessful abbreviation ENAD) on campus in which several rooms with X-terminals offered black-and-white graphical interfaces to Sequent and other UNIX machines scattered around the campus. Soon I chose the “breaking point” (the term that Jason presented to me) ended up in one of the laboratories with X terminals, which in essence were intended only for engineering students, a ban not backed by passwords and therefore modestly ignored.
But the gold mine of ENAD should be sought in its laboratories with Sun workstations. Unlike the modest Z-29 and even relatively advanced X-terminals, Sun's computers were a model of art with their shiny cases and high-resolution color displays. Moreover, Jason explained that they worked on the best UNIX of that time, on SunOS, although Sana's were much more “locked up” than the X-terminals, requiring an account of the local local network to access them, so I there was no chance to actually touch SunOS until much later.
I also had access to UNIX through my home Intel 286th PC and 2400-baud modem, which saved me from traveling through the entire campus to computer labs, especially during cold days. It was cool to have the opportunity to get to Sequent from home, but I didn’t want to lose my experience at the ENAD X-terminals, so one day in January 1993 I went to look for an X-server that would work on my PC. Since I was looking for a similar thing in Usenet, I ran into something called “Linux”.
Linux was not an X server of course, but it was something much better: a completely UNIX-like operating system for PCs; that I could not even imagine that it existed. Unfortunately, he demanded a 386 processor or higher, and my PC was then 286th. So I started to postpone my pennies for a car powerful enough for him to work on it, and at the same time, while I was doing it, I absorbed everything I could get on the subject of my dream. A few weeks later, I sent a message to the Purdy computer group of the Usenet network, asking if there was anyone on campus who is running Linux — and received one reply from a computer student named Mike Dickey, who happily invited me to show yourself your Linux installation. Stunned, I bought a box with 30 floppy disks and started a slow process of downloading Linux from them from the Krannert computer lab, but it would take another month so that I could buy the necessary computer to install it. In the end, I could not wait any longer, so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostel with a single computer and late February evening penetrated there to install Linux on this laboratory PC. I still wonder at times: what was that unfortunate student who first came the next morning there should have thought?
Linux was created a year and a half before Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki. Longtime computer enthusiast Torvalds went his way, let's say, similar to mine, but he began his programmer career with the Commodore Vic-20 and didn't spoil it with the more traditional hobbies of teenagers popular in the 80s. The first acquaintance of Torvalds with UNIX took place in 1990 during his course at the university and, like me, it was love at first sight.
In the autumn of the same year, Torvalds began to attend courses on operating systems that used the textbook “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” by Andrew Tanenbaum (Andrew Tanenbaum) - a professor of computer science at Amsterdam University Vrae. Tanenbaum’s book taught operating systems on the example of a UNIX-clone for a PC called MINIX, which he wrote and also included full source code — that is, readable and editable MINIX source code on a set of floppy disks so that readers could install, use and modify this operating system. Intrigued, Torvalds bought a PC in early 1991 and joined the growing MINIX community — the tens of thousands of contributors brought together by the Usenet comp.os.minix newsgroup. He began experimenting not only with MINIX, but also with the new multitasking capabilities of the Intel 80386 processor, which stood on his PC. (Multitasking makes it easier to start one or more programs on the processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions of shared access systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I had to meet in Purdu next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged core of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is an intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these computational functions, making it much easier to write complex applications.
MINIX was not only a friendly operating system for amateur programmers, a project that existed in 1991, but it was one of the few ready for use and almost the only one that could work on low-cost PCs. The most famous project of the operating system until then was GNU, under the leadership of Richard Stallman. Stolman, who had been programming since the mid-1960s, being a system programmer at MIT (Massachusetts Technological University) from 1971 to 1983, was an old-school hacker, one of those who do computers on their own initiative and in some cases zealously (including the Stolman case) Believe that all information should be freely distributable.
The goal of the GNU project was to create a free operating system (free not only at a price, but also free in the sense of freely modifiable) that would be compatible with UNIX (GNU was a so-called reverse acronym meaning “Gnu's Not Unix”, “so-called” because he used a powerful chip often used by programmers to cause recursion, which includes computation that uses itself as one of its input data. Stolman launched the GNU project in 1983 as an answer to the growing proprietary software market, that - in which the source code can not be changed, but more often they are not available.
The proprietary programs became openly new in the early 1980s and very worrisome to Stallman. Until then, programs were widely and freely distributed along with hardware, and hackers often shared copies of their source code, along with their own changes and improvements. Stolman considered the growing trend towards proprietary programs no less than the first step towards the digital utopia of 1984, in which computer users, and ultimately all of society, would be overwhelmed by greedy corporate interests and intended to stop this.
By mid-1991, Stolman and a scattered group of volunteers gathered most of the GNU operating system — the compiler, debugger, editor, command interpreter (or shell), many utilities and software libraries that were like UNIX, only better — the GNU versions were generally considered better their namesakes. The only thing missing was that it was the core and a small team was soon created at the Stolman Free Software Foundation (a non-profit organization that he created in 1985 to oversee the development of GNU and protect free software) to write this last element. Programmers around the world believed that it would be just a matter of time - the completion and availability of GNU, and that they would finally get an operating system free of corporate burdens.
In the other half of the world, Torvalds’s own operating system core became ready enough to release it into the world. In the now-famous Usenet post comp.os.minix, on August 25, 1991, he wrote:
“Hello everyone there who uses minix. I am doing a (free) operating system (only as a hobby, it will not be as big and professional as gnu) for 386 (486) AT-compatible. She has been brewed since April and is about to be ready. I would like some feedback on what people like or dislike in minix, since my OS is similar to it in some way (the same physical location of the file system (for practical reasons) among other things). ”
The answer was immediate and stunning. While everyone expected GNU to be made soon, it was not yet ready, at least in the form in which it could be used without UNIX backups. And while MINIX was popular, it was not free, although it was certainly inexpensive compared to other UNIXes. Perhaps more important, however, was that MINIX was viewed primarily as a tutorial, rather than software for production, as Tanenbaum did not like to include many patches and changes to his operating system, which would extend its capabilities that flowed daily from the crowd of enthusiasts. users around the world, fearing that their additions would make MINIX too complex and therefore more difficult for students to learn.
The lure of a UNIX-like PC operating system, no matter how imperfect it was, which was free and could evolve at the speed with which the community itself wanted it, was too good for many MINIX users to resist it, so they began to flock to the new OS Torvalds, which in the fall of 1991, it seems, has already turned into “Linux”. However, Linux was just the kernel — it required a lot of tools and applications installed on top to make it really useful. Fortunately, most of them already existed thanks to the GNU Stolman project.
By 1992, several fearless users began assembling image sets for floppy disks that combined Linux with a number of GNU tools to make it easier for new users to install and run. These collections (later called “distributions”) were getting better each time, and by the time I finally got my PC in March 1993, the Softlanding Linux System (or SLS) distribution kit had already grown to 30 diskettes and included many applications. and, yes, almost all those programs that worked in the X-terminals of the ENAD building.
I never tried to connect the Linux X-server, which at that time was on my computer to Sequent, which apparently would also be painfully slow at a speed of 2400 baud - several thousand times slower than modern speeds anyway. Because now I had my own personal UNIX, which could be studied right here at my own table. And I conducted the study in the literal sense: “break your UNIX”. Having overcome the excitement of the fact that I am a “superuser”, an indescribable force that I had only seen behind a glass wall before, I began to admire not so much Linux itself, as it was created by hundreds of people who code in their own backstage of the system and using the Internet to update the code, slowly but surely making the system better with each change - I began to make my own contribution to the growing community: a new distribution called Debian that would be easier to use and that would be More reliable, since it would be built and maintained together by its users, like Linux itself.
(c) Ian Murdock
Original publication on debian.net
How I got into Linux
')
I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was a young student at Purdu University. At the time when I was still a student at the Kranner School of Management and my childhood love for computers was re-awakened by a compulsory programming course that I studied during the fall semester (we were given a choice of COBOL and FORTRAN, both of them even in 1992 seem to be very outdated - I chose COBOL because it seemed to be the more “working” of these two languages).
Ten years or more ago, my father, a professor of entomology at Purdu, changed his typewriter at work on an Apple II +. Believing that his nine-year-old son could benefit from this, he brought the computer home on a weekend with the Space Invaders game, which he had previously bought at the local ComputerLand store. I spent many hours at the computer that weekend. After that, I began to accompany my father to the laboratory whenever possible in order to spend as much time as possible at the computer.
As a nine-year-old, I was predictably fascinated at first by games, and this interest in games led me to my first meeting with programming: computer magazines published code samples for very simple games, which I, in turn, drove carefully at Apple, hoping, after hours of hard work, that I did not make a single mistake (Apple II, at least out of the box, offered a primitive line editor so that returning and making changes were very tedious, not to mention the luxury of finding mistakes).
Soon after, I met Lee Sadlow, staggering around the lab on weekends. Lee was one of Dad's graduates who began using Apple to help his experiments. Lee was always happy to explain to me what he was doing when I hung over his shoulder watching; his kindness was no doubt justified, at least in part, by the fact that the nine-year-old jerk who followed his every step was the offspring of the dean of his faculty. Without thinking about it, I admiringly looked at how he wrote out the code at Apple - the code that he invented himself, and did not write off from a computer magazine.
Between learning through learning source codes from computer magazines and random “lessons” from Lee, I soon began writing games and other simple programs, first on Applesoft BASIC, and later in 6502 assembly language. To encourage my growing interest, the father, ultimately, I bought an Apple IIe home and my computer hobby continued for several more years. However, when I became a teenager, the computer was gradually supplanted by more pressing things: such as baseball, music, and girls, and by the mid-1980s Apple began collecting dust in my dresser along with a collection of Hardy Boyz tales and Star Wars figures.
My passion for computers was dormant for the next half-dozen years until I was accidentally woken up during the COBOL language course in the fall of 1992. When the course ended, I naturally lost my account on the IBM 3090 mainframe, on which we performed tasks and laboratory work. Fortunately, as a student, I was attached to a personal account on one of the machines at the university computer center, either to IBM, or to one of the three Sequent Symmetry mini-computers running DYNIX, a version of the UNIX operating system. A friend convinced me that UNIX is more interesting and has a brighter future than IBM's VM / CMS, and I followed his advice and applied for access to one of the Sequent machines. The next week I was the proud owner of an account on sage.cc, complete with a generously generous disk space of 500 kb. (Yes, this is sarcasm, since 500 kb was a meager amount even for 1992. By the way, over time I found ways to get around this).
That winter, I had a wolfish appetite for UNIX. I spent most evenings in the basement of the math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of the Z-29 terminals, exploring every corner on the floors of the UNIX system. It was frighteningly quiet in those rooms with terminals where the only sound was the clack-clank-clan of several dozen keyboards and the occasional whisper like: “Hey, look at this ..”. Often, after the evening of discoveries, I walked out of the building along a long path, passing by the glass wall behind which the computer center kept its cars, gazing with trepidation at the Sequent Symmetry the size of a refrigerator, behind which I just worked, looking at the flashing lights and realizing that hundreds of people are still inside, even if only virtually, thanks to the sharing magic that technically advanced computers used to share their computing power among many users, creating the illusion that each of them is one native But most of all, I looked with envy at the system administrators who were cool enough to have the right to sit on the other side of the glass, endowed with the all-powerful power of the “superuser” in the system console.
Dissatisfied with the Z-29, I began scouring the campus at nightfall along with a friend Jason Balicki and the idea of finding something else. Jason was a participant in a scientific computer program for several years, so he knew where to look (although it was not without our contribution to science - it was partly entertainment - to enter buildings at night and pull the door handles, which computers could have, on the subject : are they open?
The best laboratories, as I found out, were in an engineering office building (referred to as unsuccessful abbreviation ENAD) on campus in which several rooms with X-terminals offered black-and-white graphical interfaces to Sequent and other UNIX machines scattered around the campus. Soon I chose the “breaking point” (the term that Jason presented to me) ended up in one of the laboratories with X terminals, which in essence were intended only for engineering students, a ban not backed by passwords and therefore modestly ignored.
But the gold mine of ENAD should be sought in its laboratories with Sun workstations. Unlike the modest Z-29 and even relatively advanced X-terminals, Sun's computers were a model of art with their shiny cases and high-resolution color displays. Moreover, Jason explained that they worked on the best UNIX of that time, on SunOS, although Sana's were much more “locked up” than the X-terminals, requiring an account of the local local network to access them, so I there was no chance to actually touch SunOS until much later.
I also had access to UNIX through my home Intel 286th PC and 2400-baud modem, which saved me from traveling through the entire campus to computer labs, especially during cold days. It was cool to have the opportunity to get to Sequent from home, but I didn’t want to lose my experience at the ENAD X-terminals, so one day in January 1993 I went to look for an X-server that would work on my PC. Since I was looking for a similar thing in Usenet, I ran into something called “Linux”.
Linux was not an X server of course, but it was something much better: a completely UNIX-like operating system for PCs; that I could not even imagine that it existed. Unfortunately, he demanded a 386 processor or higher, and my PC was then 286th. So I started to postpone my pennies for a car powerful enough for him to work on it, and at the same time, while I was doing it, I absorbed everything I could get on the subject of my dream. A few weeks later, I sent a message to the Purdy computer group of the Usenet network, asking if there was anyone on campus who is running Linux — and received one reply from a computer student named Mike Dickey, who happily invited me to show yourself your Linux installation. Stunned, I bought a box with 30 floppy disks and started a slow process of downloading Linux from them from the Krannert computer lab, but it would take another month so that I could buy the necessary computer to install it. In the end, I could not wait any longer, so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostel with a single computer and late February evening penetrated there to install Linux on this laboratory PC. I still wonder at times: what was that unfortunate student who first came the next morning there should have thought?
Linux was created a year and a half before Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki. Longtime computer enthusiast Torvalds went his way, let's say, similar to mine, but he began his programmer career with the Commodore Vic-20 and didn't spoil it with the more traditional hobbies of teenagers popular in the 80s. The first acquaintance of Torvalds with UNIX took place in 1990 during his course at the university and, like me, it was love at first sight.
In the autumn of the same year, Torvalds began to attend courses on operating systems that used the textbook “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” by Andrew Tanenbaum (Andrew Tanenbaum) - a professor of computer science at Amsterdam University Vrae. Tanenbaum’s book taught operating systems on the example of a UNIX-clone for a PC called MINIX, which he wrote and also included full source code — that is, readable and editable MINIX source code on a set of floppy disks so that readers could install, use and modify this operating system. Intrigued, Torvalds bought a PC in early 1991 and joined the growing MINIX community — the tens of thousands of contributors brought together by the Usenet comp.os.minix newsgroup. He began experimenting not only with MINIX, but also with the new multitasking capabilities of the Intel 80386 processor, which stood on his PC. (Multitasking makes it easier to start one or more programs on the processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions of shared access systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I had to meet in Purdu next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged core of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is an intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these computational functions, making it much easier to write complex applications.
MINIX was not only a friendly operating system for amateur programmers, a project that existed in 1991, but it was one of the few ready for use and almost the only one that could work on low-cost PCs. The most famous project of the operating system until then was GNU, under the leadership of Richard Stallman. Stolman, who had been programming since the mid-1960s, being a system programmer at MIT (Massachusetts Technological University) from 1971 to 1983, was an old-school hacker, one of those who do computers on their own initiative and in some cases zealously (including the Stolman case) Believe that all information should be freely distributable.
The goal of the GNU project was to create a free operating system (free not only at a price, but also free in the sense of freely modifiable) that would be compatible with UNIX (GNU was a so-called reverse acronym meaning “Gnu's Not Unix”, “so-called” because he used a powerful chip often used by programmers to cause recursion, which includes computation that uses itself as one of its input data. Stolman launched the GNU project in 1983 as an answer to the growing proprietary software market, that - in which the source code can not be changed, but more often they are not available.
The proprietary programs became openly new in the early 1980s and very worrisome to Stallman. Until then, programs were widely and freely distributed along with hardware, and hackers often shared copies of their source code, along with their own changes and improvements. Stolman considered the growing trend towards proprietary programs no less than the first step towards the digital utopia of 1984, in which computer users, and ultimately all of society, would be overwhelmed by greedy corporate interests and intended to stop this.
By mid-1991, Stolman and a scattered group of volunteers gathered most of the GNU operating system — the compiler, debugger, editor, command interpreter (or shell), many utilities and software libraries that were like UNIX, only better — the GNU versions were generally considered better their namesakes. The only thing missing was that it was the core and a small team was soon created at the Stolman Free Software Foundation (a non-profit organization that he created in 1985 to oversee the development of GNU and protect free software) to write this last element. Programmers around the world believed that it would be just a matter of time - the completion and availability of GNU, and that they would finally get an operating system free of corporate burdens.
In the other half of the world, Torvalds’s own operating system core became ready enough to release it into the world. In the now-famous Usenet post comp.os.minix, on August 25, 1991, he wrote:
“Hello everyone there who uses minix. I am doing a (free) operating system (only as a hobby, it will not be as big and professional as gnu) for 386 (486) AT-compatible. She has been brewed since April and is about to be ready. I would like some feedback on what people like or dislike in minix, since my OS is similar to it in some way (the same physical location of the file system (for practical reasons) among other things). ”
The answer was immediate and stunning. While everyone expected GNU to be made soon, it was not yet ready, at least in the form in which it could be used without UNIX backups. And while MINIX was popular, it was not free, although it was certainly inexpensive compared to other UNIXes. Perhaps more important, however, was that MINIX was viewed primarily as a tutorial, rather than software for production, as Tanenbaum did not like to include many patches and changes to his operating system, which would extend its capabilities that flowed daily from the crowd of enthusiasts. users around the world, fearing that their additions would make MINIX too complex and therefore more difficult for students to learn.
The lure of a UNIX-like PC operating system, no matter how imperfect it was, which was free and could evolve at the speed with which the community itself wanted it, was too good for many MINIX users to resist it, so they began to flock to the new OS Torvalds, which in the fall of 1991, it seems, has already turned into “Linux”. However, Linux was just the kernel — it required a lot of tools and applications installed on top to make it really useful. Fortunately, most of them already existed thanks to the GNU Stolman project.
By 1992, several fearless users began assembling image sets for floppy disks that combined Linux with a number of GNU tools to make it easier for new users to install and run. These collections (later called “distributions”) were getting better each time, and by the time I finally got my PC in March 1993, the Softlanding Linux System (or SLS) distribution kit had already grown to 30 diskettes and included many applications. and, yes, almost all those programs that worked in the X-terminals of the ENAD building.
I never tried to connect the Linux X-server, which at that time was on my computer to Sequent, which apparently would also be painfully slow at a speed of 2400 baud - several thousand times slower than modern speeds anyway. Because now I had my own personal UNIX, which could be studied right here at my own table. And I conducted the study in the literal sense: “break your UNIX”. Having overcome the excitement of the fact that I am a “superuser”, an indescribable force that I had only seen behind a glass wall before, I began to admire not so much Linux itself, as it was created by hundreds of people who code in their own backstage of the system and using the Internet to update the code, slowly but surely making the system better with each change - I began to make my own contribution to the growing community: a new distribution called Debian that would be easier to use and that would be More reliable, since it would be built and maintained together by its users, like Linux itself.
(c) Ian Murdock
Original publication on debian.net
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/345870/
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