RMS Talk in NZ
Some years ago, when IBM was investing gazillions of dollars into Workplace
OS, it appeared that Mach might well "rule the world." If Workplace OS
"succeeded," then there would be:
a) A community of students learning to build MK stuff atop Mach,
b) Widespread understanding of Mach-like systems,
c) People porting Mach to anything looking like a reasonably modern CPU.
This of course comes in as a "win" for anyone wanting to build other stuff
(like Hurd) atop Mach-like systems.
Somewhat similar to the way that Linux benefited from using ISA/VLB/PCI
computer hardware that was primarily designed for use with WinTel systems.
If Linux had required expensive, custom-built hardware, it would have
failed.
Something that Linux has "shown the world" is that it's possible to make a
monolithic OS kernel about as portable as they thought microkernels would
be. It's turning out to be fairly straightforward to port Linux to new
CPUs, given a GCC code generator. (Note that NetBSD had already established
that this was plausible; Linux has the difference that intentions of
portability were an afterthought...)
--
cbbrowne@hex.net - What have you contributed towards Linux today?
North Texas Linux Users Group <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
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