Why Linux owes (part of) its success to Microsoft
One of the things that characterizes humanity is our ability to adapt quickly to external change - it’s the key reason, for example, that humans aren’t confined to one climatic zone on the planet.
On the other hand, we’re individually often really bad at adapting to external change - and I suspect that everyone who’s worked in IT for more than few months has been personally guilty of refusing to learn to use a new tool for a job simply because you felt comfortable doing it with the older, and far less efficient or effective, tool.
When IBM needed a basic OS that could run effectively on Intel’s 8088 processor the answer Patterson came up with for QDOS was to minimize CP/M’s overhead by stripping the kernel/shell layering - effectively eliminating Kildall’s commitment to portability and multi-processing to produce something tailored specifically to the limitations of one particular piece of hardware.
Similarly, when Linus Torvalds decided to build a “free Unix for the 386″ he stripped away Tanenbaum’s layered micro-kernel and hardwired Intel’s approach to interrupt management directly into what has since become the largest monolithic kernel still in use.
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