One thing that drew me to computers from the start was going to computer clubs and seeing the cool hacks that people had managed to get working using their computers. For instance, I once saw a VIC-20 with a "real" 80x25 video card, for instance, and a guy who created his own OS.
As time went by, clubs were less important and the Internet took over as a place to swap ideas and clever software hacks. For instance, there is the typesetting system TeX, and a guy once put an entire TeX DVI viewer with fonts into just one small executable, enabling me to do real word processing on a 386 DX. Later, some guy named Linus did what others had also done -- the Mach group for example -- he created a workstation-class kernel for the 486, however Linus did something wonderful. He didn't try to price-gouge consumers with it, nor refuse to give it away while whining about how parts of the OS were owned by such-and-such Regents. No, he gave it away for free. Soon after, some clever people had ported X Windows to it, and suddenly my 486 DX2 laptop was something like a workstation -- it was really civilized. In every case of something amazing like this happening, I remarked that it was "cool", clever or novel. Just as was the subsequent creation of LAME and the posting of MP3 files to Usenet. And later the creation of Divx and Xvid. However I am not entirely sure that the hobbyist movement has continued to be cool, clever, and doing novel things. The hobbyist was always the core of such successes, pushing the envelope for fun, not because he was paid to. Today however Linux is rather business-minded, and money seems to be the primary concern of everyone. It's become mainly a bandwagon for business. I am not convinced that truly cool things are happening any longer, because I am not seeing barriers being broken through at least in the area of software. Indeed, nor in hardware. Everyone involved in Linux seems to be using a hot-rod system that offers no barriers. Where is the cool? _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss