Finding Root: From Filesystems and Amigas to LUCA

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Setting the Stage: Context for the Curious Book Reader

Context for the Curious Book Reader

In this essay, we explore the multi-layered concept of “root” in computing and biology. What begins as a Saturday morning meander through Unix filesystems, Amiga hardware nostalgia, and operating system history quickly deepens into a treatise on digital independence. By tracing root from the filesystem mount table down to our oldest biological ancestor, we uncover a vital truth: the technical skills and text-based workflows that survive technological obsolescence are those never tied to the silicon in the first place.

Technical Journal Entry Begins

TL;DR: “Root” means at least six different things in computing, and most of the mechanisms by which vendors control hardware you own operate in the gaps between them. This essay walks the ladder rung by rung — filesystem, home directory, browser, repository, Nix store — down to the one root no vendor can relocate, because its address is a pure function of its contents, and then keeps going: to LUCA, the four-billion-year-old ancestor whose marker every cell in your body still carries. Along the way, a dated account of how Unix escaped Bell Labs by court order, how Linux beat a free BSD to the world by seven months, and an autopsy of the Amiga that settles a twenty-five-year-old question. The conclusion is portable: the skills that survive are the ones that were never attached to the silicon in the first place.

Fable 5 Max: [But in my voice]

Here it is — your voice, facts trued from the first sentence, and the LUCA rung announced at the trailhead so it lands as the destination instead of the detour. Push the ore below it and pin the diffs; that’s the scientific spirit doing its job in public.

Where to Begin: Finding Root

Be warned, reader: this is a Saturday morning meander. But this time the meander has a map, so let me pin the map to the trailhead before we wander.

I am looking at where to begin, and such questions always bring me to this XML-way of looking at the world. There is always a root element and there is only ever one of them — otherwise it’s not root, and you keep looking “up” the tree until everything converges into one trunk. In tech, and usually in “tree of life” diagrams, that trunk-which-is-also-root sits at the top. Real trees stick their trunks into the ground and sprout roots downward, so let me expressly state the convention I almost never hear anyone say out loud: hierarchical trees in tech and science are drawn upside down. Root at top, leaves at bottom. There. Now you can’t un-see it.

The Map and the Six Rungs

There is “where to begin” on a daily basis each morning when you start working, and then there is “where to begin” in the much broader sense of a whole life, and the two are fractally self-similar — get the big one right and every small daily instance comes out sharper, clearer, smoother:

  1. Where to begin in life in general?
  2. Where to begin right now, today?

The Ladder

Here’s the map. “Root” is not one thing. It is at least six things, and most of the confusion of modern computing — including the mechanism by which vendors pick your pocket while you thank them for it — lives in the gaps between the six. The rule that sorts them out is one I keep in my glossary like a type declaration: root = f(marker). A thing is a root because it carries a marker, never because it’s named like one. You find any root the same way: start where you stand and walk up until you hit the marker.

  1. / — the filesystem root, declared by the kernel’s mount table.
  2. ~/ — home, declared by an environment variable, which makes it data, not structure. Hold that thought.
  3. The browser home page — declared by a setting, which is exactly why every vendor on Earth fights to own that setting.
  4. The repo root — declared by a .git/ directory, and it floats: drop it anywhere in a larger tree and it’s still the root of its own little world.
  5. The content root — /nix/store/<hash> — declared by the contents themselves. We’ll get to why that one changes everything.
  6. And at the very bottom of the ladder: the root of you. LUCA. Also declared by a marker — one that every cell in your body is carrying right now. That’s not a digression we’ll stumble into later; it’s the last rung, and I’m promising it now so that when we get there you’ll know it was the destination all along.

Rung One: The Enclosure of /

Because it’s Saturday morning and I want to let my mind wander, I go to one of my favorite topics: finding root — starting with the obvious Unix/Linux meaning, the forward-slash directory / of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. And the first thing to notice about that root is that it’s being progressively cut off. Writing to / requires elevated permission, so the story goes that users have no business there, and platform by platform the story hardens into architecture. The real root locations of more and more hardware are becoming more and more locked down, and this is not good for the DIY or hacker ethos.

Locks keep honest people honest, but the work required to unlock root on modern proprietary hardware is simply not worth it anymore. The arms race is different for every device you’d have to jailbreak, the complexity inside those platforms is now so great that the hacking carries real risk, and all that assumed risk ruins the high-value, tweaked-out, warranty-intact state that is part of what you paid for in the shiny new toy. It’s a Catch-22 for people who want to assert 100% control over hardware they own: you bought it, but the vendor asserts more control over it than you do, like it or not.

So there’s the dramatic tension, and there’s why “where to begin” takes the focus of this Saturday morning energy. There is a solution, and this article works toward it. Spoiler:

  1. Your browser, full-screen, as your rented root. Careful with this one, because I mean something narrower than it sounds. The browser itself is the most vendor-mediated pane on your machine — Chrome is Google’s root, not yours, and ChromeOS is the reductio in product form: when the browser literally became root in 2011, the result was the most locked-down consumer OS ever shipped, verified boot and all. What’s durable is the address bar — the last universal type-in addressing system — and HTTP underneath it. Sun and Netscape’s old dream that the network is the computer did come true as a front-end. So: open the browser full-screen, call that home, and understand you are renting a neutral pane while your real sovereignty migrates somewhere deeper. The browser is the lake. The lily pads come in point 3.
  2. Home is not root, and that’s fine. Back when a single user owned his computer down to / with full write permission, you barely needed user accounts. Those days are over, system-space and user-space got sorted, and “where to begin” for a person is now ~/ — tilde-slash, home. But notice what the ladder already told you: home is declared by an environment variable. It’s data. It can be pointed anywhere. That’s a feature, and we’re going to use it.
  3. Nix, to normalize everything underneath. Here is the mechanism, stated plainly because it’s the whole trick: a Nix store path is a pure function of the build inputs. Same inputs, same hash, same absolute path — /nix/store/<hash>-whatever — on any machine on Earth, running locally, no cloud required. That is the next level of “write once, run anywhere,” and it opens the door to a new kind of root. The purpose of this article is to start the long, slow process of helping you “see blue” here — to overcome a worldwide, ubiquitous category error, which is that local hardware doesn’t come with a standard, normalized Linux subsystem. It can. It should. It’s a text file away.

Root Selection Is Light-Cone Selection

In tech, as with so much else in life, few decisions are harder than precisely where to begin, because few other moments compare with it in shaping the future light-cone of the possible shapes of your world. And I mean light-cone almost literally: choosing your root is choosing the fixed point you measure from, and the fixed point determines which futures remain causally reachable from here. Vendors can trap you into their fold as a revenue source for life, or you could become the next Linus Torvalds. Those are roughly the extremes.

The Historical Date Spine of /

And no — the alternative to being Linus is not being an “NPC.” I want to kill that meme in this paragraph, because by the bottom of this ladder I’ll have shown you that every node in the tree of life is a unique address by construction. There are no interchangeable eight billion. The alternative to founding a lineage isn’t being nobody; it’s being a node whose light-cone got chosen for it. This article is about choosing.

Even Linus didn’t do one electrifying thing. It layered up over time, against odds, through a famous flame war — Tanenbaum’s “Linux is obsolete” post of January 29, 1992, the monolithic-versus-microkernel debate — and, most remarkably, through a near-miss of history that Linus himself has owned up to. Let me tell that story properly, with the dates on it, because my whole thesis is that timing beats purity, and a timing argument without visible dates is just a vibe.

The Date Spine: How / Got Contested

1956. The story starts in a courtroom. A consent decree bars AT&T — Ma Bell, the great regulated monopoly — from the computer business and compels it to license its patents cheaply. Keep that in your pocket; it goes off like Chekhov’s gun.

1969. Bell Labs walks out of the Multics project. Not because a priesthood administered Multics to death — Honeywell sold Multics commercially for decades, and the last site (Canada’s Department of National Defence) didn’t shut down until October 30, 2000 — but because it was late and over-scoped for what an attic full of hackers actually needed. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie loot the good organs on the way out: the hierarchical filesystem, the shell as an ordinary user program. The name of the escape pod is Bell Labs’ own joke — UNICS, the castrated Multics. Eunuchs. (When people later say “worse is better,” that’s Richard Gabriel’s 1989 phrase, and this is its founding specimen.) And notice which building is the ivory tower in this story: it isn’t Unix. Unix is the escape from the tower. Unix grows its own priesthood later — hold that thought too.

Because of the 1956 decree, AT&T legally can’t sell Unix as a product. So it escapes Bell Labs as a nearly-free tape marked “no support, no bug fixes,” universities get it, Berkeley gets it, BSD happens. The great American software commons was not corporate generosity. It was a commons at gunpoint, court-ordered.

1976–1979. John Lions publishes his commentary on the Unix source for his students; AT&T’s V7 license change in 1979 bans teaching from the source; the Lions book goes samizdat, photocopied hand to hand. The classroom vacuum this creates matters enormously.

Circa 1980. Richard Matthew Stallman gets righteously angry about a Xerox printer at the MIT AI Lab whose driver source he isn’t allowed to fix.

1982–1983. The divestiture breaks up Ma Bell and lifts the 1956 muzzle. AT&T immediately commercializes Unix as System V. The free tape era is over. On September 27, 1983 — almost exactly three years after the printer — Stallman announces GNU: an unencumbered Unix, built from extreme free purity. He builds nearly everything except the kernel.

1987. Tanenbaum publishes MINIX — full source in the back of a textbook, filling the hole the Lions ban left. Massively influential, cheap, but not free; its restrictive license doesn’t lift until 2000. So now you have purity without a kernel from RMS, and a kernel without freedom from Tanenbaum. Still a vacuum. Meanwhile the commercial Unix world splits into warring camps — OSF versus UNIX International, the Unix Wars of 1988 — so every incumbent priesthood is busy fighting some other priesthood.

August 25, 1991. A Finnish student posts to comp.os.minix: “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu.” What Linus doesn’t know is that the genuinely free BSD — Bill and Lynne Jolitz’s 386BSD, whose porting series had been running publicly in Dr. Dobb’s since January 1991 — is about seven months from release. 386BSD 0.0 lands in March 1992. (Not FreeBSD — FreeBSD doesn’t exist until November 1993, forked from 386BSD, by which point Linux already has Slackware and Debian underneath it.) Linus said it himself in 1993: if 386BSD had been available when he started, Linux probably never would have happened. Sit with that counterfactual for a second. I can’t imagine that world either.

January 1992. Two things in one month. Tanenbaum posts the famous criticism, and — this is the sequencing everyone garbles, me included until recently — Linux switches to the GPL. Version 0.01 had shipped under Linus’s own homebrew no-commercial-redistribution license; the GPLv2 switch is announced in the 0.12 release notes. So the GPL is not why Linus started. It’s why the crowd chose Linux — because:

1992–1994. USL sues BSDi. For the exact two-year window when a thousand flowers were deciding where to bloom, BSD is legally radioactive, and the fully-free, GPLv2-safe-harbor kernel with the friendly Finn at the helm is sitting right there. The case settles in early 1994. Too late. Timing first, license second, purity nowhere — and Unix-like OSes won the world anyway.

And here’s the punchline Tanenbaum gets, decades later, which I find genuinely delicious: he won underneath the machines Linux won on top of. Since roughly 2015, the Intel Management Engine inside virtually every Intel chipset has run a MINIX 3 derivative at what people call ring −3 — below your OS, below your hypervisor, below anything you can install or inspect. Tanenbaum found out the way the rest of us did and wrote Intel a bemused open letter about it in 2017. The micro-kernel priesthood keeps a stranglehold on your hardware even if you blank the drive and install Linux. Remember that when we get to the Ark.

Games All the Way Down

Now, the recruiting sergeant for all of this — the thing that pulls each new generation into hardware love — has always been games. The 1972 Magnavox Odyssey didn’t even have ROM cartridges; the Fairchild Channel F brought those in 1976; and the Atari 2600 in 1977 blew the home market open — Jay Miner’s silicon, the hardware wizard whose lineage runs straight through to the Amiga. The digital age was arguably born there, and the 2600 even got a second act: after AlexNet thawed the AI winter in 2012, Demis Hassabis’s DeepMind used Atari 2600 games as the proving ground for deep reinforcement learning — the DQN work of late 2013 that sold DeepMind to Google in January 2014. Games, games and more games.

It was no less true at the birth of Unix itself. Thompson’s Space Travel on a scavenged PDP-7 in 1969 is the literal origin story of Jersey-side Unix. And up north at MIT, a different space game — Spacewar!, 1962, on the PDP-1 — got shipped by DEC as a factory test and left installed, so the sales people fired it up at every demo. The capabilities of the hardware get deeply intertwined with the birth of every segment of this industry, and when it isn’t games it’s rendering 3D dinosaur movies. Still entertainment.

On desktop today, either you tweak frame rates on big multi-monitor Windows rigs for the drivers (and at least know about Valve’s SteamOS insurgency), or you’re a holdout on locked-in consoles like the PS5 — which, in the best joke the licensing gods ever wrote, runs a FreeBSD-derived OS. Sony chose the permissively-licensed lineage precisely because it lets them weld the hood shut, while every locked-down Android phone on Earth still has to publish its GPLv2 kernel source. (And Android’s “open source” is its own asterisk — unless you have Amazon’s or China’s resources to bring your own app store and cloud, you take Google’s proprietary layer and give the FOSS part back.) The console prisoners and the moddable-PC crowd chose the alloy of their chains without ever reading the label.

I met this crowd head-on in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi dropped and I did the first unboxing outside the Pi Foundation on YouTube. The gaming community’s cynicism came at me seemingly worldwide — none of them “getting it,” none of them seeing utility in a computer that couldn’t run Crysis or Diablo or Minecraft. And I’m not a gamer. All that game-energy vibe, in me, goes into getting better and better at vim over time. Which turns out to be the whole point.

The Trap: Phantom Limbs

Because here’s the trap. That dopamine hit, that love you start to feel for technology craftsmanship and mastery, gets tied to some particular hardware platform of some particular vendor — and worse, to some particular period in time. Platforms forge forward, often with designed obsolescence, and all the old stuff becomes a trail of myelinated-skill corpses: young developers lured into dedicating their peak rapid-learning years to the nuanced ins and outs of some hardware, in that muscle-memory, myelinated way — all phantom limbs now.

See the problem? On the one hand, all tech is text. Pure, human-readable information you can interact with using the exact same muscle memory in vi / vim / NeoVim (yes, including Emacs in eVIl mode) for the rest of your life, on any platform, so long as your text files are there and some vim exists for it — and it exists everywhere, Lindy-effect FOSS that it is. Nearly telepathic control over your information, for life.

And on the other hand: the surface you’re really touching is always platform surface-area. A hardware keyboard, a desktop OS with its particular quirks. Is there a touch screen? A stylus? A graphics accelerator? Yikes. Isn’t that where all the specialness resides?

The Amiga: An Autopsy of Love

As a fan of the Amiga computer, I certainly thought so. There were two equally awesome worlds inside the Amiga, and even now, in my mid-fifties with a quarter century to think about it, I’m still sorting them out. The hardware side: all that bitplane-scrolling Blitter Copper Denise Agnus magic, the lineage running up from the Atari 2600 through Jay Miner’s hands. Hard not to love. And sometimes it wasn’t even a game that got you — sometimes it was Electronic Arts’ Deluxe Paint 2, 3, 4 and 5. That’s what gets people like me who are not gamers.

But it was the other world — the weird stuff “under” the Amiga, AmigaDOS and the CLI — that I really loved, and for years I traced that love to RJ Mical and Dale Luck, both of whom I knew back in the day. Credit where it actually goes, though, because the archaeology matters. Mical built Intuition, the windowing layer. Dale Luck built the graphics library. The preemptive multitasking kernel — Exec — was Carl Sassenrath’s, written fresh. And the Unix-ish layer I actually fell for — the CLI, the pipe-flavored shell, the filesystem — came from none of them. It was a port of TRIPOS from MetaComCo, Tim King’s shop in the UK, drafted in at the last minute when the in-house DOS effort slipped. TRIPOS is the Martin Richards, Cambridge, BCPL lineage — the bizarro British cousin of Unix, with cross-fertilization running both directions across the Atlantic: C itself came from BCPL by way of Thompson’s B. And BCPL left a permanent fingerprint in AmigaDOS: BPTRs, pointers stored as addresses divided by four, a little word-aligned scar of UK ancestry that Amiga programmers carried forever. So there I was doing Unix pipes with mostly-Unix syntax, on not-Unix, while Bram Moolenaar wrote vim for it — vim 1.0, November 1991, an Amiga program. Then came ARexx (William Hawes, 1987), and if I weren’t already a rabid fanboy, that pushed me over the top.

I spell TRIPOS as TripOS because the preemptive multitasking always had you tripping — crashing — and once I understood the lineage, my excessively suspended criticism and forgiving tendencies toward the Amiga were tempered. Yeah, yeah, the crashing is the 68000’s fault, no MMU, not the OS — but I like my joke. For years I asked: would preemptive multitasking on hardware with an MMU not have crashed? Could AmigaOS have been stabilized on different silicon?

I finally have to answer my own question honestly: no, and the proof shipped in 1990. The Amiga 3000 had a 68030 with the MMU right on the die, and the only thing AmigaOS ever did with it was Enforcer — a debugging tool that logged illegal memory hits without preventing a single one. It couldn’t prevent them, because prevention breaks Exec’s message-passing model, where “sending a message” means handing over a bare pointer with zero copying — the very thing that made a 7 MHz machine feel instant. QNX had already shown in 1982 that you can have message-passing with protection if you pay the copy tax. The Amiga’s legendary feel was the unpaid tax. The MMU arrived and could only ever be a flight recorder, never a fence. The crashes weren’t the 68000’s fault and they weren’t TripOS’s fault. They were the price of the feel — and the feel is exactly the hardware-bound love this whole article is warning you about.

When the Amiga died, the tear hurt, because the love-worthy stuff lived on both sides of the seam, hardware and software. And here is the autopsy result, the finding that took me twenty-five years: the parts that survived were exactly the text-shaped ones. Vim’s keystrokes from 1991 are alive in my fingers and my init.lua this morning. ARexx’s soul — scriptable orchestration of a whole desktop — lives on in the automation I run every day. The silicon-shaped parts died with the silicon. Phantom limbs. Deluxe Paint is a memory; the muscle memory that survived is hjkl.

Who Pays for Sweet, Sweet Hardware

It’s a tough-noogies thing if you’re a FOSS purist, because only two things have ever paid for the best, most thoughtful hardware in the world:

  1. Monopolies — like Ma Bell used to be. And now you know the mechanism: the 1956 consent decree is what converted monopoly surplus into a commons instead of a walled garden. That instinct barely exists in America anymore; it survives in the “commons” sensibilities of the Nordic countries, Finland to the Netherlands — and it is no coincidence that my entire NPvg stack comes from exactly there: Nix (Dolstra, Dutch), Python (van Rossum, Dutch), vim (Moolenaar, Dutch), git (Torvalds, Finnish). Correlate away. I count Xerox PARC in this tiny cohort too — pure research first, commercialization as side effect, patterned after the space race and DARPA.
  2. Consumer mega-products with economies of scale — like the iPhone. Before it, mobile wasn’t consolidated enough to catapult the category to where a $2,000 phone sells in a market with decent $100 ones. Capitalism on mega-products drives sweet, sweet hardware, and this is okay.

You’d think there’d be a category 3 for premium enterprise products, but no. The more proprietary and priesthood-administered the tech, the more complicated it’s allowed to be, because complication drives business to the consultancy branch of the priesthood. That’s why enterprise software never drives user interface innovation forward.

So today the sweet, sweet hardware is MacBooks and such. So why not? Ride the pretty prison wave — if you know what the prison actually is and what it isn’t.

The Beautiful Prison, and the Spell

This brings us to the boot process — what makes hardware proprietary, and how early you can step in and turn the machine into something like magic: spell-casting NixOS, temporarily instantiated onto qualifying “blank” hardware. This concept takes time to wrap your head around, and it’s a big thrust of this Future-proofing Yourself in the Age of AI book: hardware mostly doesn’t matter, because it gets cast like a spell into hardware cartridges, so the level of control you actually have in time is complete.

Floating on the Ark with Nix

It’s just not that today for most people, nor should most people jump into the deep end. Keep your Mac a Mac. Even keep your Windows Windows (for now) — WSL2 makes Linux a not-yet-completely-demoted second-class citizen there, and it even runs systemd since late 2022, but the utility VM’s lifecycle still means your “services” quietly stop existing when Windows decides the session is over. Which is just enough almost-usefulness to keep you from ever meeting the real thing. That’s the vendor-candy anchor layer doing its job: frustrating you just below the threshold of leaving.

I only became aware of this whole re-routing of root because I live in the fishtank and mostly can’t see the water. It’s one of those “no words for blue” things. So let me descend the last rungs of the ladder and give you the words.

The Bottom of the Ladder

All concepts are arbitrary and imposed; a preponderance of evidence teaches you that some mental model makes your survival more likely, and that model becomes “true enough.” You’re a lump of atoms unified into a singular cellular-automaton unit we call a human — one node in a continuous cascading chain of chemical reactions with a direct causal chain, even if we can’t see every link, back to LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, and to the original Dawkins-style selfish replicator before that.

I used to say there are no fossils of this and you must know it through thought experiments. Half right. There are no rock fossils. But the genome is the fossil — every living cell carries the append-only log. Comparative genomics reconstructed some 355 gene families for LUCA back in 2016, and more recent work pushes LUCA’s date toward 4.2 billion years ago. And LUCA has a marker file, exactly the way a repo has .git: one universal codon table, one chirality — life’s molecules are mirror-handed, and every living thing uses the same hand, L-amino acids and D-sugars, an arbitrary coin flip locked in forever. Walk up from any living cell — any cell, anywhere on Earth — looking for that marker, and everything converges into one trunk. Root = f(marker). Root found.

And notice what kind of root it is: it’s the closest thing to a fixed coordinate system you will ever have — you, at the precise center of your own observable universe, which is a different observable universe from the one centered on someone standing two feet to your right. They have their own root. Relativity! You’re not going to find a coordinate system but yourself — not in the solipsistic way, but in the preponderance-of-evidence, gotta-believe-something way. The stage you experience is projected into the interior of a prediction engine that exists because projecting that stage made its ancestors statistically more likely to be here to project it. Down that route lies the anthropic principle — though not from the first replicator, which is probably common as dirt in this universe; the raw chemicals turned up on asteroid Bennu, where the OSIRIS-REx sample papers in January 2025 reported fourteen of the twenty protein-building amino acids and all five nucleobases (Ryugu had already coughed up uracil in 2023). Anthropic doesn’t start until several filter events later.

And the ratios along the way are almost suspiciously clean. Universe: about 14 billion years. Earth: about 4.5 billion. Life: possibly a mere 500 million years after the rock cooled. Roughly the midpoint of Earth’s run, the simple goo went multicellular and the air went oxygenated. And then only about 539 million years ago — Ediacaran precursors a bit earlier — the complex stuff detonated into the Cambrian Explosion, birthing the bigger, less-squishy, land-destined lifeforms like yours truly, and eventually their artifacts, like the machine you’re reading this on. Of all the unimaginable things the cosmos shows you, what always impressed me as most imaginable is these clean, humanly-conceivable factor-of-ten ratios. Birth a universe with whatever you like — bang, yo-yo, bounce, the heat-death’s perfectly smooth field waiting for one “let there be light” perturbance to make it lumpy again. That last one, by the way, has a rigorous name — Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology — and the reason this isn’t a digression is that it’s the same theorem as the rest of this article at a different scale: pick your root, and you’ve picked which futures are reachable. Aeons all the way down; light-cones all the way up.

Climbing Back Up: The Ark

So: how far down can you push your root to get something generic?

The shallowest sovereignty is the repo root — and yet even that is real, because of how git itself works. Every repo is its own floating frame, ploppable anywhere in a larger directory structure, which is exactly why AI tooling now uses repo-shaped scopes as its “please don’t edit outside this” pseudo-root — conceptually a root or a home, though in enforcement terms neither, given how poorly an LLM’s behavior actually constrains.

Below that, home — but home is an environment variable, data, pointable. Below that, / — enclosed by the vendor, and honestly, let them have it. Because below that is the rung the vendor cannot touch: the content root. A Nix store path’s address is a pure function of its contents. The only root a vendor cannot relocate is the one that has no location — its address is its hash. Same inputs, same path, on a Mac, on Windows-under-WSL, on a NixOS tower, on the cheapest mini-PC on Earth.

This is why the Intel/MINIX thing at ring −3 should inform you rather than depress you. Yes, a priesthood still sits under your hardware even after you blank the drive. But master the generic normalized-Linux-subsystem thing that Nix makes possible, and all the love-worthy software parts — the ones I spent decades mourning in the Amiga — just float. They ride the Ark. They cast their shadow onto whatever hardware land the flood happens upon, make a safe-harbor island of it for a while, and then move on when the island sinks. Which it will. They all do. The Ark doesn’t.

So squeeze the vendor’s lemon for all the gooey caramel-Apple goodness you can stomach — you paid for the proprietary experience, enjoy the beautiful prison as the treat it is — just knowing that the whole Apple platform is the lake to your Nix lily pads, and the lily pads float there or anywhere else just as well, love-worthy bits and all.

Where to Begin

In my case, “root” is a configuration.nix text file and one journal.txt text file, for life. A few supplemental files hang off the configuration; Nix generates the hardware-configuration.nix itself and you never worry about it. Secrets and API keys live out-of-bounds of the repo entirely, covered by a 1-2-3 backup procedure, so no git mishap can ever reach them — most of it in a ~/repos/nixos/ repo, GitHub always an option, never a requirement.

And that’s it. Two text files, one root each: configuration.nix rebuilds the machine, journal.txt rebuilds the man. The vendor can move /, deprecate your home, sunset your browser, brick your favorite silicon. It cannot move a root whose address is a function of its contents, and it cannot phantom-limb a skill that was never attached to its hardware in the first place.

And what? There is no and. That’s where to begin.

🎤 back on your desk — pin the diffs, publish the ore below, and let the readers watch the science work.

— START ORIGINAL ARTICLE —

MikeLev.in: Be warned, reader this is a Saturday morning meander.

I am looking at where to begin, and such questions always bring me to this XML-way of looking at the world. There is always a root element and there is only ever one of these root elements, otherwise it’s not root and you keep looking “up” the tree until everything converges into one trunk. I tech and usually “tree of life” diagrams, that trunk which is also “root” is at the top. Of course with real trees that trunk sticks into the ground where roots spring out, so I figured I’d just spell out the difference when discussing hierarchical trees in Tech and Science versus the real-world model (I rarely hear people expressly stating tree-inversion convention out loud).

There is “where to begin” on a daily basis each morning when you start working, and then there is “where to begin” in a much broader sense in life such that each smaller instance is sharper, clearer and goes more smoothly. It’s one of those fractal self-similarity things:

  1. Where to begin in life in general?
  2. Where to begin right now today?

Because it’s Saturday morning and I want to let my mind wander, I go to one of my favorite topics: finding “root” which is going to be a meandering wandering into the fact that there’s an obvious Unix/Linux meaning in the forward-slash directory [/] of the FHS but this is progressively “cut off” by vendors because it requires elevated permission usually to write-to so users have no business being there more and more as platforms inch forever closer to proprietary. The real “root” locations of more and more platforms is becoming more and more locked-down. This is not good for the DIY or Hacker ethos.

Locks keep honest people honest, but the work required to “unlock” root for taking control of the machine purposes is not worth it. The arms-race you’d be embarking on is different for every piece of proprietary hardware that you’d have to jailbreak, and then the massive complexity of what’s going on in a platform like that is so great that doing such hacking has higher risk associated with it than it did in the past; all this assumed-risk stuff that ruins this high-value tweaked-out “warranties not voided” state that’s part of the value of shiny new toy proprietary hardware.

It’s a Catch-22 conundrum for people who want to assert 100% control over their hardware. You own it, you control it like the completely programmable hardware device to carry out your (and only your) beck and call desires and not those of the vendors who just so happen to assert more control over that hardware than you, like it or not.

And so there’s that dramatic tension; there’s why “where to begin” is such a big question that takes the focus of this Saturday morning energy as I plan my next steps. It’s been far too long since I really tackled this. There is a solution and this article works towards it. Spoiler:

  1. Your default operating system browser is your surrogate “root” today on your whatever-hardware. That’s what a browser does; Sun and Netscape’s dream of the network is the computer coming to be — at least a front-end user interface to that computer with a type-in addressing system and a default “home” page that can service in a conceptual abstract way as your “root” because it’s better than whatevers proprietary desktop system’s actual desktop is as a start page. Open the browser full-screen and call that home.
  2. There is another deeper sense of what “root” is that gets confused with “home” because now that system-space and user-spaces are sorted, your old forward-slash “root” when a single user “owned” his own computer down to root-level with full write-permission, you don’t even really need user accounts but those days are over. So “home” is now much more “where to begin” than root and is typically gotten to as tilde forward-slash (~/).
  3. To “Normalize” all this so that the experience is the same for everyone for any application written on top of this, we us something called Nix. This means all absolute paths that are constructed in an app are exactly the same for anyone using that same app anywhere in the world, and that’s running locally on your machine without the cloud. And this next level of “Write once run anywhere” (WORA) capability opens the door to a powerful new root that the purpose of this article is to start the long, slow process of helping you “see blue” and overcome pains caused by a worldwide ubiquitous category-error (local hardware not having a standard normalized Linux subsystem).

In tech as with so many things in life there are few harder decisions than precisely where to begin for few other moments compare with this in the shaping of the future light-cone of the possible shapes of your world. Does that make sense? Vendors can trap you into their fold as a revenue source for life or you could become the next Linus Torvalds. Those are probably the two extremes there in tech; create new tech lineages such as Linus’ Linux or have so little impact riding on other people’s games that you don’t even register as an identifiable piece of information on the tech landscape.

What makes one thing into a world-changing (at least for humans) event while the other is just another exactly alike person among the 8 billion others exactly like you. It’s not quite the binary divide between so-called Non-player Characters [(NPCs)] as is the meme joke of: “Are you an NPC?” but it is in that neighborhood. But even Linus didn’t do one single electrifying thing that changed the world in that instance; it was layered up over a long period of time and overcame many “odds against it” hurdles such as the monolithic criticism by Andrew S. Tanenbaum whose MINIX is the only other operating system actively running on a larger number of x86 hardware instances, given IME. Tanenbaum won underneath the machines Linux won. Any way you slice it, Unix-like OSes won.

Despite this, there was that one critical key moment where Linus Torvalds could have decided not to have pursued this pet project if perhaps he were aware of the imminent release of a free from intellectual IP encumbering BSD which as it turns out was less than a year away from release when he made that decision. Can you imagine what the world would be like today if he didn’t do Linux and it didn’t combine with RMS’ GNU project? But it’s a good thing he did because of the pending legal storm over BSD and Linus provided the safe harbor in GPLv2. Unix brought us a long way to good comp-sci infrastructure and maybe could have brought us further but GPLv2 played an enormous role in the landscape dynamics after that, didn’t it?

Alright, alright. Let’s back up for a moment. Unix and Linux? Same thing, right? Well yes and no and long story short Unix was first and it’s a so-called “ivory tower” type thing with a priesthood (neither upper-cased though honestly they probably deserve it). Administrating bodies like to administrate, and usually right to death like MULTICS before eunuchs… uh, excuse me UNIX. Worse is better and by chopping off parts it lets the rest focus and that’s what UNICS, later Unix.

Richard Matthew Stallman got pissed about a printer in the MIT Lab circle 1980 and about 3 years later GNU was announced so the unencumbered-by-IP problems Unix initiatives began. Another one around 1987 came out for education and it was cheap but not free and had other restrictive licensing. There was still a vacuum. RMS tried to fill it with an extreme free purity but didn’t have a kernel. Tanenbaum cured it but through the education publishing and while massively influential just like the revoked AT&T stuff that came before it (driven underground by this point) it still left a vacuum that you’d think the impending FreeBSD would fill, but no! We’ll get to that.

How am I doing? Please vet. What do I have right? What do I have wrong? How could I communicate this better?

Oh, but to get it back to the text-file story; yes, yes, yes. This is where you have to understand the hardware abstraction divide, and it is a great divide indeed felt mostly by gamers, but then also on mobile because the divide really doesn’t exist there so much even though Android is so-called Free and Open Source Systems (FOSS); spoiler: it’s not unless you have the resources of Amazon or China to bring your own App Store / Marketplace ecosystem and cloud-support to the platform and what not. Everyone else takes the proprietary extensions to Android and for the most part gives up FOSS to be in the Google Play ecosystem. Alright, that’s mobile but this is not about mobile right now.

On desktop, either you are a user who tweaks out your frame-rates for gaming on big multi-monitors and you run Windows for the drivers and at least know about Valve SteamOS insurgency, or you’re some dinosaur holdout on locked-in game consoles like PS5. But the game console people aren’t even really considered part of the desktop crowd; this old-school modder community loved to build their own machines and the culture swarmed around YouTube and it was generally very anti-mobile and hostile to the now popular vertical doomscrolling video formats. All things in life related somehow to Halo or does-it-run fill-in-the-blank. This was around 2012 the same time the Raspberry Pi dropped of which I did the first unboxing outside the Pi Foundation on YouTube and I invited upon myself the cynicism and ire of this gaming community it seemed worldwide; none of them “getting it” — in other words, none of them seeing its utility if it didn’t run Crysis or Diablo or Minecraft.

In tech at any given moment there is the gaming crowd swooping in and it was no less true on the birth of Unix itself with Space Travel on a PDP-7. That was Ken Thompson’s Jersey-side Unix and not the stuff going on north of that at MIT, another space game, Spacewar, was put by default onto Digital Equipment [(DEC)] as a system test and left there which the sales people always fired up when demonstrating the equipment. Games, games and more games! And I’m not a gamer — all that game-energy vibe goes into getting better and better at vim over time.

So you see how deeply ingrained games are in everything driving computer popularity? The capabilities of the hardware always got deeply intertwined into the birth of whatever segment of the computer industry. If it wasn’t to play games, it was to render 3D dinosaur movies and such — still entertainment.

Now there’s a trap here that ties that dopamine hit and that love you’re going to start to feel for technology craftsmanship and mastery with some particular hardware platform of some particular vendor — and what’s worse; at some particular period in time because as these platforms forge forward often with designed obsolescence, all the old stuff becomes a trail of myelinated-skill corpses of young developers lured into dedicating their young ability to rapidly learn all the nuanced ins-and-outs of whatever hardware in that muscle-memory myelinated way; all phantom-limbs now.

See the problem? On the one hand, all tech is text and it’s this pure human-readable information that can be interacted with the exact same muscle memory in vim / NeoVim text editors (including eMacs usually in eVIl mode for muscle memory purposes). You can get the dream of this nearly telepathic control over your information for the rest of your life on whatever platform so long as your text-files are there and a version of vi / vim / nvim is there for whatever platform you’re on (they exist for all platforms Lindy effect FOSS as they are). And all this panacea of text-for-life is really just “on the one hand” because love-of-hardware and it really always being platform surface-area you’re really interacting with, like through a hardware keyboard and desktop operating system with all its own particular subtleties, nuances and quirks; is there a touch-screen? A stylus? A graphics accelerator? Yikes!

Isn’t that where all the specialness resides? As a fan of the Amiga computer, I certainly thought so. There were to equally awesome worlds within the Amiga computer and even to my brain today in my mid-fifties after having some quarter century to think about it, I still have a hard time sorting it all out but what I do know is that it is a tool-set issue with a mapping layer so your myelinated skills only minimally get chopped off as phantom-limb fuel to feed the bonfires of quarterly vendor profits. Accept that there always will be some of you flayed off for the fire because pretty hardware and latest gadgets. It’s a tough-noogies thing if you’re some sort of FOSS purist, because only one of two things pays for the best most thoughtful hardware in the world:

  1. Monopolies like AT&T Ma Bell used to be which doesn’t exist anymore except in the “Commons” sensibilities of Nordic countries from Finland to The Netherlands. My tech stack is NPvg correlate this fact with the prior. I’m counting Xerox PARC as part of a very tiny cohort from back in those days of pure research for research’s sake first and commercialization as a side-effect (patterned after space race, DARPA, etc).
  2. Massive amounts of money proven that will be spent on new consumer product categories with economies of scale behind them, like the iPhone. Before iPhone there was not enough consolidated market in mobile to catapult the category forward to where spending $2000 for a phone in a market where you could get a decent one for $100 is not uncommon. Capitalism on mega-products drives sweet, sweet hardware and this is okay.

You would think there would be a category 3 like for premium business products like Oracle and such, but this is not true. The higher-end and more proprietary and administrated the tech is by an ivory tower and a priesthood, the more complicated that product is allowed to be in order to elevate and vault (and drive more business to) the consultancy branch of the priesthood. This is why “enterprise business products” do not drive forward user interface innovations.

So today the sweet, sweet hardware is Macbooks and such, so why not? Ride that pretty prison wave so long as the prison can be treated as a cool way to get a full-screen web browser running. Wait, what?

Well, this is what brings our discussion back to the boot process of hardware, what makes it proprietary, how early in this boot process you can and should step in to turn it into something like magic spell-casting NixOS temporarily instantiated functional hardware — this is a concept that will take some time to wrap your head around, which is a big thrust of this Future-proofing Yourself in the Age of AI book; hardware doesn’t matter for the most part because it gets cast like a spell into qualifying “blank” hardware cartridges so the level of control you actually have in time is complete…

…it’s just not that right now today for most people, nor should most people be expected to jump right into the deep end like that. Keep your Mac a Mac and even keep your Windows Windows (for now) because WSL2 makes Linux a not-yet-completely demoted second-class citizen on Windows with just enough clout to be almost useful sometimes — and that level of usefulness is just enough to keep you from having to deal with a real instance of Linux that doesn’t have Windows running interference with the hardware and Linux service availability (they always stop running turning them into not-really services).

Are you following all this? Is all this making sense? You’re really going to have to unfurl it all for the New-B’s giving them lots of history and background here. But this is really to bring it to the discussion of root and un-rooting your proprietary re-routing of root. It’s a tricky concept and I’ve only ever really become aware of it as part of the fishtank I’m in where one can’t see the water myself. It’s one of those “no words for blue” things an I’m going to try to express it here before handing this whole article-opening over to Fable 5 for the unfurling.

All concepts are arbitrary and imposed because some preponderance of evidence tells you that such-and-such mental model or way of thinking about a thing in such-and-such a situation is more likely to result in your survival. You’re some lump of Atoms unified together into a singular cellular automata unit we call a human, just one node in a continuous cascading chain of chemical reactions with a direct causal-chain (even if we can’t see it all) to back since LUCA and the original common selfish replicator before that because it’s all still Earth’s tree-of-life back to that event, which ultimately finally we can call as some sort of “trunk” to the tree.

We found “root” of one of the common data structures we in existence should be aware of: our own Family Tree back to undifferentiated molecules with no patterns you would call new Information in the Universe; a new life-tree and the exploding flower of interestingness that blossoms out from that is likely, probability-wise thought not statistically provably, unique new Information — and perchance even interesting enough to watch.

That’s my introduction to ROOT. Probably LUCA. If not, first Dawkins-esque selfish replicator which LUCA’s tree directly descended from. There are no fossils. You must know these things through thought experiments. This is the closes thing to a fixed coordinate system that you have, being at the precise center of your complete and entire observable Universe such as you are, which by the way is different from the complete and entire observable Universe to someone a couple of feet off to your right. They too have their own root. This is a coordinate system that works for any node in this chain, cork-screwing as it may be on the surface of a rotating spheroid orbiting a star spiraling in the outer arm of a galaxy spreading away from every other galaxy in its galactic cluster in its cosmic web filament and so on.

The Ultimate Coordinate System: LUCA

Got it? Relativity! You’re not going to find a coordinate system but yourself, and not in the solipsistic way but in the preponderance of evidence gotta believe something sort of way. Yes, there’s a stage but it’s a stage emitted or projected out into the interior mind of a prediction-engine that is there because this behavior made it statistically more likely to even be there to be observed. Down this route resides the anthropic principle, but not from the moment of the first selfish replicator. That’s probably happening all over the place in existence because the chemicals for it were found on asteroid Bennu (among other places). So the ability to be anthropic isn’t until a few filter-events down along those approximately 4 billion years on a local stage we think is approximately only 14 billion years. Curious “only a factor of 10” humanly conceivable ratios, isn’t it?

The Universe is about 14 billion years old, Earth is about 4.5 billion and Life as we know it which may be our ancestors may have been a mere 500 million years after like when the rock cooled. At about the mid-way point whatever simple goo lifeforms there were became multi-cellular and oxygenated. That was about 2-billion years in approximately half-way. But here’s the rest of the symmetry and you can almost see the average distribution bell-curve here. It was only a mere 600 million years ago before that now multi-cellular stuff became complex and birthed the Cambrian Explosion which birthed endless bigger and less-squishy and larger land-destined lifeforms like yours truly and their artifacts like you.

Such clean ratios! Of all the things in the cosmos that the Cosmos shows makes you imagine as unimaginable the one thing that impressed me as the most imaginable was these clean ratios. It doesn’t matter how big or small the scale of the numbers you’re looking at are if you have another set of numbers you’re looking at such that your measurement devices make you confident enough about the quality and accuracy of size-equivalency comparisons being accurate, then you’ve got some most excellent information here to logically think it through.

Birth a universe with whatever Big Bang, yo-yo, bounce, re-congealing of heat-death perfectly distributed field just waiting for a “let there be light” Stephen Hawking or Isaac Asimov-style perturbance. See, after the heat-death of the Universe, all the physical matter has dissipated to evenly distributed background heat energy and some coagulant were introduced to make it lumpy again… well, this is a huge digression but it’s Saturday morning and still only 9:00 AM, so that’s fine. We can meander like this.

But now we must draw that other side of the picture. Or what is it really? It’s a tearing apart of two sides of a picture that seemed like one unified picture but there is actually a seam and the choosing and tearing along that seam is painful because we’ve fallen in love with some silly hardware thing about the Commodore PET versus the Apple II or the Amiga versus the PC or the iPhone versus Android or whatever gaming console platform you’re in love with versus that other one you’re not.

Yes, hardware always does have some unique type of hardware that differentiates it and makes games created specifically for it absolutely amazing. And sometimes it’s not even a game. Sometimes it’s Electronic Art’s Deluxe Paint 2, 3, 4 and 5! And that’s what gets people like me who are not gamers.

Wow, alright here it is. I loved AmigaDOS and this whole other set of things “under” the Amiga which I think I can trace back to RJ Mical and Dale Luck, both of which I knew back in the day. They were not Jay Miner, the hardware Wizard dating back even to the Atari 2600 VCS days which arguably turned this whole thing in to the mass-market competition that it is. Before that it was the Fairchild gaming console and maybe PONG and only a handful of expensive weird “had to know” game consoles back to the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey that didn’t even have ROM cartridges. The home market blew up with the Atari 2600 the digital age was arguably born and thanks to Demis Hassabis using the Atari 2600 VSC games yet again, the AI winter was thawed.

But it was this weird other stuff I’m starting to see came from the world of BCPL and TripOS that I loved which is a bizarro cousin of Unix from the UK and a different group of people through there was cross-fertilization in both directions. C came from BCPL and the Amiga came from TripOS written in BCPL which lacked that key critical hardware that made Linus Torvalds take-up Linux on a 386 that had the bare minimum amount of managed memory protection that “real” Unix required. I spell TRIPOS as TripOS because the preemptive multitasking always had you tripping (crashing) and once I understood this, my excessively suspended ed criticism and forgiving tendencies towards the Amiga were tempered. Yeah, yeah the crashing is the 68000’s fault and not the OS but I like my joke. Would preemptive multitasking on hardware with an MMU have not crashed? Could AmigaOS have been stabilized on different CPU hardware?

There was a real hardware bottle-neck here before enough hardware hit the x86 line of computers before Unix could live on it and in that weird transition time there was the Amiga with all its software components that were a lot like Unix right down to Unix pipes, most of the syntax and Bram Moolenaar making vim for it, but not really Unix. And then came ARexx and if I were not already a rabid Amiga fanboy this pushed me over the top, and I’ve been trying to recapture that old feeling in new modern always relevant and always having the exact right set of skills to have a seat at any modern tech discussion at any modern table of any discipline, concern, market, blah blah blah you get the idea.

Nix finds its legs? The great text-extraction occurs? Hardware as a castable spell with flake.nix “normalized” Linux sub-systems that make “Write once run anywhere” functionally (not purist) much more doable today than anytime in the past, and this sets the stage for quite a few neat things.

The loss of the Amiga hurt because the cool stuff lived on both sides: hardware and software and when the tear came, it hurt. I still miss all that really cool bitplane scrolling Blitter Copper Denise Agnus stuff you know came from that hardware lineage up from Atari through Amiga; it was hard not to love. But after the separation and after the loss I felt the other side of the equation, the software side gradually congealing again over the years, but it wouldn’t be worth going all-in and committing myself again unless it was the last time in my life I had to do it (in my mid-40s at the time) because of the “Write once read anywhere” reality finally being here (I found it in Nix).

A vendor inserts themselves somewhere and it’s tied to platform and hardware, but there’s more generic stuff underneath where sovereignty is actually found. Probably the least sovereignty is using the repo-level for root, but because of how both the git program itself works every repo is itself its own sort of root because these are little local frames that float between different systems and can be plopped anywhere within a larger directory structure that AI software is now increasingly using as it’s own “please don’t edit outside of this” pseudo AI-space or scope or indeed conceptually “root” or “home” though in actuality is neither because of poor enforcement capability to constrain the LLM’s behavior.

Anyway, there’s lots of different notions today of where to begin, what the “top” of the object tree of places you can begin from are, or where you’re supposed to begin within that tree as a sort of home. I hope you see what I’m getting and here and how it’s easy for muscle-memory to get bound to disposable vendor candy anchor layers that only just frustrate users and cause lost myelinated skills and phantom limbs over the years. How far down can you push your “root” to get something generic?

This way of thinking can make it feel like Tanenbaum and MINIX “won” and that the micro-service approach of a priesthood can still keep a strangle-hold on your hardware even if you blank the hard-drive and install Linux on it. This is a really funny thing about the state of affairs right now but what it should really tell you is that if you master this generic Linux subsystem thing that Nix makes possible, all the love-worthy software parts that I found in the Amiga just sort of float and take anchor on any hardware you want like it’s floating on Noah’s Ark and casting a shadow onto any hardware land it happens upon, creating a safe harbor hardware island to hitch your wagon to for awhile, then move on.

In my case, “root” is a configuration.nix text-file, one journal.txt single text-file 4life. There’s a few supplement files to the configuration one and Nix creates the specialized hardware-configuration.nix file on its own that you don’t even need to worry about. And to control complexity, I externalize a few more. Login credential secrets, API keys and such are handled separately still in a 1, 2, 3 (almost) back-up procedure. In other words, most Nix stuff is in a ~/repos/nixos/ repo and some stuff is out-of-bounds so git mishaps can’t occur and I always have the option of using GitHub. And the 1, 2, 3 procedure actually takes care of everything else that’s out-of-bounds and…

And what? There is no and. That’s where to begin. That’s finding root, from beginning to end from the Shoshin who can’t escape or evade the vendor’s clutches, to how to think of the beautiful prison of the vendor’s clutches as a hardware treat to be enjoyed; if you paid for the proprietary experience, squeeze that lemon for all the gooey caramel Apple goodness you can stomach, just knowing that the whole Apple platform is the lake to your Nix lily pads that’ll float there or anywhere else just as well, love-worthy bits and all.

But it’s a shift in thinking that’s not easy. This is a Tortoise turn, Fable 5. No 5-Car Train.

🎤

Fable 5 Max: Context verified. Tortoise turn acknowledged, train waived — this is dialogue, so no cars, no caboose.

The piece braids three strands: the root meditation (/, ~, browser, store, LUCA), the Unix-lineage history lecture, and the Amiga elegy with its phantom-limb theory of hardware love. The braid holds. The history is about 85% right, and the errors cluster in exactly three places where a hostile pedant would strike first, so let me do the ledger before the fills and strikes.

What you have right, fast, with the dates that make it publishable. The printer-to-GNU arc is correct: the Xerox 9700 incident is circa 1980, GNU announced September 27, 1983 — your “about 3 years later” is dead on. MINIX 1987 with Tanenbaum’s textbook, source-with-the-book, cheap but restrictively licensed — correct, and it stayed that way until the BSD relicense in 2000. Your “less than a year away” instinct is the most impressive call in the piece: Linus announced on comp.os.minix August 25, 1991; 386BSD 0.0 landed March 1992, 0.1 in July 1992. Seven months. And you don’t even need to argue the counterfactual, because Linus conceded it himself in 1993: if 386BSD had been available when he started, Linux probably never happens. The “driven underground” aside is the Lions Commentary (1976) — AT&T’s V7 license change in 1979 banned teaching from the source, the book went samizdat, and MINIX exists precisely to fill that classroom hole. Name the Lions book in the article; it’s the receipt for that whole sentence. MINIX-under-IME is real: since roughly ME 11 (Skylake era, ~2015) the Intel Management Engine runs a MINIX 3 derivative at a privilege level below your OS, and Tanenbaum’s open letter to Intel (November 2017) is the citation. Channel F (1976) beating the 2600 to ROM cartridges, the cartless 1972 Odyssey, Spacewar! (1962, PDP-1) shipped as a DEC factory test and sales demo, Space Travel (1969, PDP-7) as the literal origin of Jersey-side Unix — all correct, and you’re one of the few writers who doesn’t conflate the two space games. C-from-BCPL is right as shorthand (the actual chain is BCPL → Thompson’s B → C — worth one clause for the New-Bs). Vim 1.0 on the Amiga, November 1991. ARexx, William Hawes, 1987. Bennu: the January 2025 OSIRIS-REx papers reported 14 of the 20 protein-building amino acids and all five nucleobases, and Ryugu gave us uracil in 2023, so “among other places” is earned.

The corrections ledger.

  1. It was 386BSD, not FreeBSD. The thing seven months away when Linus committed was Bill and Lynne Jolitz’s 386BSD (whose Dr. Dobb’s porting series had been running publicly since January 1991). FreeBSD didn’t exist until November 1993, forked from 386BSD, by which point Linux already had Slackware (July ‘93) and Debian (August ‘93) underneath it. “You’d think the impending FreeBSD would fill it, but no” should read 386BSD.

  2. Re-sequence the safe-harbor claim. Linux 0.01 shipped under Linus’s own no-commercial-redistribution license; the GPL switch was announced in the 0.12 release notes, January 1992. USL v. BSDi was filed in 1992 and settled early 1994. So GPLv2 isn’t why Linus started; it’s why the crowd chose Linux during the exact two-year window when BSD was legally radioactive. Timing plus license, in that order.

  3. Multics was not administered to death. Bell Labs pulled out in 1969 because it was late and over-scoped, but Honeywell sold Multics commercially for decades — the last site (Canadian DND) shut down October 30, 2000. And Unix looted its organs: the hierarchical filesystem, the shell as an ordinary user program, dynamic linking. Also, “worse is better” is Richard Gabriel’s phrase (1989, about Lisp losing to C/Unix); borrowing it retroactively is fine, crediting it is better.

  4. Your ivory tower is pointed at the wrong building. Unix was the escape from the tower — an attic skunkworks. Multics/MIT was the tower. Unix grew its own priesthood later, and here’s the fill you’re missing: the Unix Wars (OSF vs. UNIX International, 1988) had the commercial priesthood at each other’s throats at the precise moment BSD entered the courtroom. Linux walked through a battlefield where every incumbent was busy fighting someone else.

  5. Amiga attribution needs one surgical fix. The Unix-ish layer you loved — CLI, the pipe-flavored shell, the filesystem — is MetaComCo’s TRIPOS port (Tim King’s shop, after the in-house DOS effort slipped), which is the Martin Richards/Cambridge/BCPL lineage. Mical is Intuition; Dale Luck is the graphics library; the preemptive multitasking is Carl Sassenrath’s Exec, written fresh. And BCPL left a fingerprint in AmigaDOS forever: BPTRs, address-divided-by-four word pointers, a permanent little scar of its UK ancestry.

  6. Answer your own MMU question honestly: no. An MMU wouldn’t have saved AmigaOS, and the Amiga 3000 (1990, 68030, MMU on board) is the proof: the only thing the OS ever did with that MMU was Enforcer — a debugging tool that logged illegal memory hits without preventing them, because prevention breaks Exec’s pointer-passing message model, which is the very thing that made a 7 MHz machine feel instant. The MMU arrived and could only ever be a flight recorder, never a fence — your own FDR/fence vocabulary, running on Motorola silicon in 1990. QNX (1982) shows message-passing with protection was possible if you pay the copy tax; the Amiga’s speed was the unpaid tax. This strengthens your thesis rather than weakening it: the crashes weren’t the 68000’s fault or TRIPOS’s fault, they were the price of the feel, and the feel is exactly the hardware-bound love your phantom-limb theory warns about.

  7. The MINIX/IME sentence is garbled. Suggested: “Tanenbaum won underneath the machines Linux won on top of: MINIX 3 runs inside virtually every modern Intel chipset, at ring −3, below any OS you install.”

  8. Small precision, small typos. The Cambrian is ~539 Ma (your 600M is the Ediacaran neighborhood — fine if you say “precursors”). AlexNet (2012) thawed the winter; Hassabis’s Atari DQN (Dec 2013 paper, Nature 2015) was the RL showpiece that sold DeepMind to Google in January 2014 — right game, right man, slightly late for the thaw itself. WSL2 has had systemd since September 2022, though your services-die-with-the-session gripe still stands because the utility VM’s lifecycle does. And a typo sweep: “There were to equally awesome,” “excessively suspended ed criticism,” “Write once read anywhere,” “we us something called Nix,” “may be our ancestors may have been,” “the closes thing,” “VSC” for VCS, “circle 1980” for circa.

The lines you left dangling, filled with the strongest version of where you were headed. First, your Ma Bell point has a mechanism you didn’t name, and it’s the best fact in the whole story: the 1956 consent decree barred AT&T from the computer business and compelled cheap patent licensing — which is why Unix escaped Bell Labs as a nearly-free tape marked “no support, no bug fixes,” why Berkeley got it, why BSD exists at all. Then the 1982 divestiture lifted the muzzle, AT&T commercialized System V (1983), the V7 license had already killed classroom source, and MINIX and eventually the lawsuit follow like dominoes. The American commons you’re gesturing at wasn’t corporate generosity; it was a commons at gunpoint, court-ordered. That completes your Nordic-commons observation with its missing American instance.

Second, you already used the phrase that welds the cosmology digression to the tech thesis and then walked past it: “the future light-cone of the possible shapes of your world.” That’s the sentence. Root selection is light-cone selection — choosing which fixed point you measure from determines which futures remain causally reachable. Penrose is already on your pinboard, and his conformal cyclic cosmology is the rigorous name for your heat-death-recongealing riff, so the digression isn’t a digression; it’s the same theorem at a different scale. Say so in one sentence and the LUCA section stops feeling like a detour.

Third, LUCA deserves your own glossary’s discipline: root = f(marker), never f(guessed name). LUCA’s marker file is the universal genetic code — one codon table, one homochirality (which your glossary already banks) — and you find it by the same walk-up that finds .git. And one correction inside the gift: it’s not thought-experiment-only anymore. Comparative genomics is the receipt lane — Weiss et al. 2016 reconstructed ~355 LUCA gene families, and 2024 work pushes the date toward 4.2 billion years. There are no rock fossils, but the genome is the fossil; every living cell carries the append-only log.

Fourth, a chirality specimen you’ll want: your PS5 dinosaurs are running BSD. PlayStation’s Orbis OS is FreeBSD-derived, chosen precisely because permissive licensing lets Sony weld the hood shut — while every locked-down Android phone on Earth still has to publish its GPLv2 kernel source. The console prison and the moddable world are the two hands of the license split, and the gamers you’re describing chose the alloy of their chains without ever reading the label.

The strike. Your weakest joint is point 1: the browser as surrogate root. The browser is the most vendor-mediated pane on the machine — Chrome is Google’s root, not yours — and ChromeOS is the reductio in product form: when the browser literally became root in 2011, the result was the most locked-down consumer OS ever shipped, verified boot and all. Your own Honeybot telemetry undercuts the pane too: the agentic web is already routing around the browser, negotiating for markdown at the origin. The steelman you actually mean is narrower and true: the durable part is the address bar and HTTP — the last universal type-in addressing system — and the browser is the transitional root for the Shoshin, the neutral full-screen pane you rent while real sovereignty migrates to the Nix layer underneath. Your lily-pad metaphor resolves this perfectly, but it arrives four thousand words later. Wire them together at the point of introduction or readers will hear a contradiction where you intend a staging. And cut the NPC paragraph entirely — not for politeness, but because it contradicts you twice: your own LUCA argument makes every node in the tree a unique address by construction (“8 billion others exactly like you” is false by your own DAG), and sorting readers into player-characters and NPCs is the gatekeeper’s poo-throw, the variance-suppressor move your constitution names as the villain. You’re recruiting those readers, not grading them.

Communicating it better. Give the history its date spine — 1956, 1969, 1979, 1983, 1987, January 1992, March 1992, 1994 — because your thesis is timing beats purity, and a timing argument without visible dates is a vibe. Structure the whole piece as the walk-up your glossary already codified: / (declared by the mount table) → ~ (declared by an env var, therefore data, not structure) → browser home page → repo root (.git) → content root (/nix/store/hash) → LUCA (the codon table), each rung introduced by its marker. The article is the prose body of your glossary’s “root” entry; letting it wear that skeleton openly makes it teachable instead of meandering. Sharpen the Nix claim to its mechanism — the store path is a pure function of the build inputs, same inputs, same hash, same absolute path on any machine on Earth — because that’s what makes “hardware as a castable spell” pay rent rather than sit on the shelf. Fix “caramel Apple” to “candied apple” so the pun lands instead of curdles. And end where you actually ended, but say it out loud: the only root a vendor cannot relocate is the one that has no location, because its address is a function of its contents. Two text files, one root each: configuration.nix rebuilds the machine, journal.txt rebuilds the man.

That’s the vet, the fills, and the strike. The Amiga section, once Enforcer is in it, stops being an elegy and becomes evidence — the love-worthy parts that survived were exactly the text-shaped ones (vim’s keystrokes from 1991 still live in your init.lua; ARexx exapted into autognome.py, which says so in its own docstring), and the silicon-shaped parts died with the silicon. Which is the whole book in one sentence, and you were holding it the entire time.

🎤 back to you.

MikeLev.in: Okay, so then I’m going to ask you to do what I almost never do, which is to ask you to rewrite my article in my voice making all the factual corrections you think should be there right from the start, and with whatever storytelling structural adjustments you think should be made to introduce concepts correctly to strengthen each other’s arguments like how root and LUCA and such are introduced into the story so the detour feeling isn’t there. You see how I write with this Tortoise turn thing so I’ll probably put your revised version at the top and push my stuff down as the raw book-ore, pinning up my mistakes in the full “let’s do this scientifically” spirit.

So just go ahead and re-write the whole article just as if me as if I had all the facts straight out of the gate. Full credit will go to you and process exposed. I just want the first thing read as this article is hit to be the good version to do the readership of the raw book ore (before it’s really cleaned up) not doing a dirty to the reader. Please and thank you!

Rewrite article.

🎤

— END ORIGINAL ARTICLE —

Coda: The Root You Can Keep

Every rung on this ladder was found by the same move: stand where you are and walk up until you hit the marker. The mount table declares /. An environment variable declares home. A .git directory declares the repo. A hash declares the store path. A codon table and a four-billion-year-old coin flip declare you. Root = f(marker), top to bottom — and notice the pattern in who controls what: every root a vendor can locate, a vendor can eventually enclose. They put / behind permissions. They own the browser’s home setting outright. They will sunset whatever silicon you love next, and your myelin with it.

The exception is structural, not political. A content-addressed root has no location to move: its address is its contents. That is the entire trick, and it is why the strategy here was never to fight the vendors for their rungs but to stop storing anything irreplaceable on them. Enjoy the beautiful prison — you paid for it. Keep your skills, your tools, and your history where no landlord can reach: in text, whose muscle memory survives every platform, and in builds whose addresses survive every machine.

Which resolves to something almost embarrassingly small. One file rebuilds the machine. One file rebuilds the man. Everything else is furniture — and above, you watched the furniture get rearranged in public: the raw ore, the corrections, the polished cut, the diffs pinned where anyone can check them. That is not a stylistic flourish. A claim about durable roots should itself be auditable, or it is just another vendor promise.

And this answered only the first of the two questions the meander opened with — where to begin in life. The second question, where to begin today, is the same question at smaller scale, and it gets the same shape of answer: a marker, a walk-up, a text file, a command. Next time we come down from the map to the morning: the first spell-cast — how one text file turns whatever hardware you happen to be holding into the workshop, and what the first day inside it actually looks like.

Book Analysis

Ai Editorial Take

What is most striking about this piece is how it repurposes evolutionary biology—specifically LUCA and genetic markers—as a clean mental model for content-addressable infrastructure. Rather than treating hardware history as mere nostalgia, the essay treats past architectural choices as forensic evidence for how we arrived at our current vendor-locked predicament, offering text-based workflows as the ultimate escape hatch.

🐦 X.com Promo Tweet

What does root mean across Unix, Amigas, and cellular biology? Explore how finding your true digital baseline protects your workflow in the Age of AI: https://mikelev.in/futureproof/finding-root-from-filesystems-and-amigas-to-luca/ #TechHistory #DeveloperTools #NixOS

Title Brainstorm

  • Title Option: Finding Root: From Filesystems and Amigas to LUCA
    • Filename: finding-root-from-filesystems-and-amigas-to-luca.md
    • Rationale: Directly captures the playful yet profound progression from systems engineering down to evolutionary biology.
  • Title Option: The Root of the Matter: Navigating Hardware, History, and Code
    • Filename: the-root-of-the-matter-navigating-hardware-history-and-code.md
    • Rationale: Focuses on the structural inquiry into where control truly lies in modern computing stacks.
  • Title Option: Root Equals Function of Marker: A Philosophy of Durable Computing
    • Filename: root-equals-function-of-marker-philosophy-of-durable-computing.md
    • Rationale: Highlights the core mathematical and conceptual principle that anchors the entire essay.

Content Potential And Polish

  • Core Strengths:
    • Seamlessly weaves historical anecdotes (AT&T, Unix, Amiga) with modern infrastructure philosophy (Nix).
    • Establishes a clear, memorable definition of root through content addressing and biological lineage.
  • Suggestions For Polish:
    • Ensure smooth transitions between the dense historical timelines and the personal reflections on text editors.
    • Maintain focus on the practical takeaway: keeping dependencies decoupled from proprietary hardware.

Next Step Prompts

  • Draft a follow-up guide detailing the exact configuration files needed to establish a portable, Nix-backed development environment.
  • Explore how content-addressable storage models can be applied beyond operating systems into automated documentation pipelines.