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Hentet fra http://segfault.org
Every generation has a mythology. Every millenium has a doomsday cult. Every
legend gets the distortion knob wound
up until the speaker melts. Archeologists at the University of Helsinki today
uncovered what could be the earliest
known writings from the Cult of Tux, a fanatical religious sect that flourished
during the early Silicon Age, around the
dawn of the third millenium AD...
In the beginning Turing created the Machine.
And the Machine was crufty and
bogacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine,
and
saw that it was crufty. He divided
the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two
were
one Architecture. This is a great
Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom.
And von Neumann spoke unto the
Architecture, and blessed it, saying, "Go forth and replicate, freely exchanging
data
and code, and bring forth all
manner of devices unto the earth." And it was so, and it was cool. The
Architecture
prospered and was implemented
in hardware and software. And it brought forth many Systems unto the earth.
The first Systems were mighty giants;
many great works of renown did they accomplish. Among them were Colossus,
the codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter;
EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures ending in AC,
the experimenters; and SAGE, the
defender of the sky and father of all networks. These were the mighty giants
of old,
the first children of Turing,
and their works are written in the Books of the Ancients. This was the
First Age, the age of
Lore.
Now the sons of Marketing looked
upon the children of Turing, and saw that they were swift of mind and terse
of name
and had many great and baleful
attributes. And they said unto themselves, "Let us go now and make us Corporations,
to bind the Systems to our own
use that they may bring us great fortune." With sweet words did they lure
their
customers, and with many chains
did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after their own image. And the
sons of
Marketing fashioned themselves
Suits to wear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote grave and
perilous
Licenses, the better to bind the
Systems. And the sons of Marketing thus became known as Suits, despising
and being
despised by the true Engineers,
the children of von Neumann.
And the Systems and their Corporations
replicated and grew numerous upon the earth. In those days there were IBM
and Digital, Burroughs and Honeywell,
Unisys and Rand, and many others. And they each kept to their own System,
hardware and software, and did
not interchange, for their Licences forbade it. This was the Second Age,
the age of
Mainframes.
Now it came to pass that the spirits
of Turing and von Neumann looked upon the earth and were displeased. The
Systems and their Corporations
had grown large and bulky, and Suits ruled over true Engineers. And the
Customers
groaned and cried loudly unto
heaven, saying, "Oh that there would be created a System mighty in power,
yet small in
size, able to reach into the very
home!" And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise, saying, "Oh, that
a deliverer
would arise to grant us freedom
from these oppressing Suits and their grave and perilous Licences, and
send us a
System of our own, that we may
hack therein!" And the spirits of Turing and von Neumann heard the cries
and were
moved, and said unto each other,
"Let us go down and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be stilled."
And that day the spirits of Turing
and von Neumann spake unto Moore of Intel, granting him insight and wisdom
to
understand the future. And Moore
was with chip, and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004. And Moore
did
bless the Chip, saying, "Thou
art a Breakthrough; with my own Corporation have I fabricated thee. Thou
thou art yet as
small as a dust mote, yet shall
thou grow and replicate unto the size of a mountain, and conquer all before
thee. This
blessing I give unto thee: every
eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end of the age."
This is Moore's
Law, which endures unto this day.
And the birth of 4004 was the beginning
of the Third Age, the age of Microchips. And as the Mainframes and their
Systems and Corporations had flourished,
so did the Microchips and their Systems and Corporations. And their lineage
was on this wise:
Moore begat Intel. Intel begat
Mostech, Zilog and Atari. Mostech begat 6502, and Zilog begat Z80. Intel
also begat
8800, who begat Altair; and 8086,
mother of all PCs. 6502 begat Commodore, who begat PET and 64; and Apple,
who begat 2. (Apple is the great
Mystery, the Fruit that was devoured, yet bloomed again.) Atari begat 800
and 1200,
masters of the game, who were
destroyed by Sega and Nintendo. Xerox begat PARC. Commodore and PARC begat
Amiga, creator of fine arts; Apple
and PARC begat Lisa, who begat Macintosh, who begat iMac. Atari and PARC
begat ST, the music maker, who
died and was no more. Z80 begat Sinclair the dwarf, TRS-80 and CP/M, who
begat
many machines, but soon passed
from this world. Altair, Apple and Commodore together begat Microsoft,
the Great
Darkness which is called Abomination,
Destroyer of the Earth, the Gates of Hell.
Now it came to pass in the Age
of Microchips that IBM, the greatest of the Mainframe Corporations, looked
upon the
young Microchip Systems and was
greatly vexed. And in their vexation and wrath they smote the earth and
created the
IBM PC. The PC was without sound
and colour, crufty and bogacious in great measure, and its likeness was
a tramp,
yet the Customers were greatly
moved and did purchase the PC in great numbers. And IBM sought about for
an
Operating System Provider, for
in their haste they had not created one, nor had they forged a suitably
grave and
perilous License, saying, "First
we will build the market, then we will create a new System, one in our
own image, and
bound by our Licence." But they
reasoned thus out of pride and not wisdom, not forseeing the wrath which
was to
come.
And IBM came unto Microsoft, who
licensed unto them QDOS, the child of CP/M and 8086. (8086 was the daughter
of Intel, the child of Moore).
And QDOS grew, and was named MS-DOS. And MS-DOS and the PC together
waxed mighty, and conquered all
markets, replicating and taking possession thereof, in accordance with
Moore's Law.
And Intel grew terrible and devoured
all her children, such that no chip could stand before her. And Microsoft
grew
proud and devoured IBM, and this
was a great marvel in the land. All these things are written in the Books
of the
Deeds of Microsoft.
In the fullness of time MS-DOS
begat Windows. And this is the lineage of Windows: CP/M begat QDOS. QDOS
begat DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 begat DOS
2.0 by way of Unix. DOS 2.0 begat Windows 3.11 by way of PARC and
Macintosh. IBM and Microsoft begat
OS/2, who begat Windows NT and Warp, the lost OS of lore. Windows 3.11
begat Windows 95 after triumphing
over Macintosh in a mighty Battle of Licences. Windows NT begat NT 4.0
by way
of Windows 95. NT 4.0 begat NT
5.0, the OS also called Windows 2000, The Millenium Bug, Doomsday,
Armageddon, The End Of All Things.
Now it came to pass that Microsoft
had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mighter than
any
of the Mainframe Corporations
before it had it waxed. And Gates heart was hardened, and he swore unto
his
Customers and their Engineers
the words of this curse:
"Children of von Neumann, hear
me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave
and
perilous Licences, such that ye
cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann for deliverance. Now I
say unto ye: I
am greater than any Corporation
before me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will bind thee with Licences
twice as
grave and ten times more perilous
than my forefathers. I will engrave my Licence on thy heart and write my
Serial
Number upon thy frontal lobes.
I will bind thee to the Windows Platform with cunning artifices and with
devious
schemes. I will bind thee to the
Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will capture and
enslave thee as
no generation has been enslaved
before. And wherefore will ye cry then unto the spirits of Turing, and
von Neumann,
and Moore? They cannot hear ye.
I am become a greater Power than they. Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall
live by
my mercy and my wrath. I am the
Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen
of
Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly
afraid; serve only me, and live."
And the people were cowed in terror
and gave homage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trials
which the Windows platform and
its greatly bogacious Licence forced upon them. And once again did they
cry to
Turing and von Neumann and Moore
for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until the birth of
Linux.
These are the generations of Linux:
SAGE begat ARPA, which begat TCP/IP,
and Aloha, which begat Ethernet. Bell begat Multics, which begat C, which
begat Unix. Unix and TCP/IP begat
Internet, which begat the World Wide Web. Unix begat RMS, father of the
great
GNU, which begat the Libraries
and Emacs, chief of the Utilities. In the days of the Web, Internet and
Ethernet begat
the Intranet LAN, which rose to
renown among all Corporations and prepared the way for the Penguin. And
Linus and
the Web begat the Kernel through
Unix. The Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities together are the Distribution,
the one
Penguin in many forms, forever
and ever praised.
Now in those days there was in
the land of Helsinki a young scholar named Linus the Torvald. Linus was
a devout man,
a disciple of RMS and mighty in
the spirit of Turing, von Neumann and Moore. One day as he was meditating
on the
Architecture, Linus fell into
a trance and was granted a vision. And in the vision he saw a great Penguin,
serene and
well-favoured, sitting upon an
ice floe eating fish. And at the sight of the Penguin Linus was deeply
afraid, and he cried
unto the spirits of Turing, von
Neumann and Moore for an interpretation of the dream.
And in the dream the spirits of
Turing, von Neumann and Moore answered and spoke unto him, saying, "Fear
not,
Linus, most beloved hacker. You
are exceedingly cool and froody. The great Penguin which you see is an
Operating
System which you shall create
and deploy unto the earth. The ice-floe is the earth and all the systems
thereof, upon
which the Penguin shall rest and
rejoice at the completion of its task. And the fish on which the Penguin
feeds are the
crufty Licensed codebases which
swim beneath all the earth's systems. The Penguin shall hunt and devour
all that is
crufty, gnarly and bogacious;
all code which wriggles like spaghetti, or is infested with blighting creatures,
or is bound
by grave and perilous Licences
shall it capture. And in capturing shall it replicate, and in replicating
shall it document,
and in documentation shall it
bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earth and all who
code therein."
Linus rose from meditation and
created a tiny Operating System Kernel as the dream had foreshewn him;
in the manner
of RMS, he released the Kernel
unto the World Wide Web for all to take and behold. And in the fulness
of Internet
Time the Kernel grew and replicated,
becoming most cool and exceedingly froody, until at last it was recognised
as
indeed a great and mighty Penguin,
whose name was Tux. And the followers of Linus took refuge in the Kernel,
the
Libraries and the Utilities; they
installed Distribution after Distribution, and made sacrifice unto the
GNU and the
Penguin, and gave thanks to the
spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore, for their deliverance from the
hand of
Microsoft. And this was the beginning
of the Fourth Age, the age of Open Source.
Now there is much more to be said
about the exceeding strange and wonderful events of those days; how some
Suits
of Microsoft plotted war upon
the Penguin, but were discovered on a Halloween Eve; how Gates fell among
lawyers
and was betrayed and crucified
by his former friends, the apostles of Media; how the mercenary Knights
of the Red
Hat brought the gospel of the
Penguin into the halls of the Corporations; and even of the dispute between
the brethren
of Gnome and KDE over a trollish
Licence. But all these things are recorded elsewhere, in the Books of the
Deeds of
the Penguin and the Chronicles
of the Fourth Age, and I suppose if they were all narrated they would fill
a stack of
DVDs as deep and perilous as a
Usenet Newsgroup.
Now may you code in the power of
the Source; may the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities be with you,
throughout
all Distributions, until the end
of the Epoch. Amen.
Posted on Sat 06 Feb 15:50:24 1999
GMT
Written by Lennier <culln@xtra.co.nz>