Traditionally, operating systems had been written in tight assembler to extract the absolute highest efficiency possible out of their host machines.
More Quotes from Eric S. Raymond:
Worse, by the early 1990s it was becoming clear that ten years of effort to commercialize proprietary Unix was ending in failure.Eric S. Raymond
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.
Eric S. Raymond
If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.
Eric S. Raymond
For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
Eric S. Raymond
Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.
Eric S. Raymond
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