Start Learning Linux by Learning About What Pissed Off Fernando Corbato

by Mike Levin

The first thing to do when learning Linux is to understand that a young MIT student got frustrated from snooty elitists keeping him from having computer time in the 1950s when there were like only a handful of computers in the world. He invented “time-sharing” called Multics which got corrupted by evil corporations striving for a dystopian future. Fernando’s corrupted Multics panicked young Bell Labs rebel Ken Thompson who made a version that carried over many good principles, but otherwise chopped it’s balls off. It was called Eunuchs… uh, I mean UNIX.

But Unix got embroiled in a custody battle handed from one sue-happy foster to another until FreeBSD… uh, I mean Linux came onto the picture. Linux Torvalds said: Oh, this computer-scicency OS that allows piping standard out to standard in, which treats everything like a read/write file and which lets software get ported between different hardware easily is the right way to go with computer operating systems, so I’ll make changing the world into a summer project. And so he did. And any idea of learning a “graphical desktop” as anything having to do with Linux (even GNOME, KDE or xcfe) has the entirely wrong idea.