The Gospel of Tux (v1.0)

一天

From http://tech.slashdot.org/story/0 ... x-Turns-40?from=rss


Every generation has a mythology.Every millenium has a doomsday cult. Every legend gets the distortionknob wound up until the speaker melts. Archeologists at the Universityof Helsinki today uncovered what could be the earliest known writingsfrom the Cult of Tux, a fanatical religious sect that flourished duringthe early Silicon Age, around the dawn of the third millenium AD...

The Gospel of Tux (v1.0)

In the beginning Turing created the Machine.

Andthe Machine was crufty and bogacious, existing in theory only. And vonNeumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He dividedthe Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet thetwo were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginningof wisdom.

And von Neumann spoke unto the Architecture, andblessed it, saying, "Go forth and replicate, freely exchanging data andcode, and bring forth all manner of devices unto the earth." And it wasso, and it was cool. The Architecture prospered and was implemented inhardware and software. And it brought forth many Systems unto the earth.

Thefirst Systems were mighty giants; many great works of renown did theyaccomplish. Among them were Colossus, the codebreaker; ENIAC, thetargeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures endingin AC, the experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and fatherof all networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the firstchildren of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of theAncients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore.

Now the sonsof Marketing looked upon the children of Turing, and saw that they wereswift of mind and terse of name and had many great and balefulattributes. And they said unto themselves, "Let us go now and make usCorporations, to bind the Systems to our own use that they may bring usgreat fortune." With sweet words did they lure their customers, andwith many chains did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after theirown image. And the sons of Marketing fashioned themselves Suits towear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote grave and perilousLicenses, the better to bind the Systems. And the sons of Marketingthus became known as Suits, despising and being despised by the trueEngineers, the children of von Neumann.

And the Systems and theirCorporations replicated and grew numerous upon the earth. In those daysthere were IBM and Digital, Burroughs and Honeywell, Unisys and Rand,and many others. And they each kept to their own System, hardware andsoftware, and did not interchange, for their Licences forbade it. Thiswas the Second Age, the age of Mainframes.

Now it came to passthat the spirits of Turing and von Neumann looked upon the earth andwere displeased. The Systems and their Corporations had grown large andbulky, and Suits ruled over true Engineers. And the Customers groanedand cried loudly unto heaven, saying, "Oh that there would be created aSystem mighty in power, yet small in size, able to reach into the veryhome!" And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise, saying, "Oh, thata deliverer would arise to grant us freedom from these oppressing Suitsand their grave and perilous Licences, and send us a System of our own,that we may hack therein!" And the spirits of Turing and von Neumannheard the cries and were moved, and said unto each other, "Let us godown and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be stilled."

Andthat day the spirits of Turing and von Neumann spake unto Moore ofIntel, granting him insight and wisdom to understand the future. AndMoore was with chip, and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004.And Moore did bless the Chip, saying, "Thou art a Breakthrough; with myown Corporation have I fabricated thee. Though thou art yet as small asa dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of amountain, and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give unto thee:every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end ofthe age." This is Moore's Law, which endures unto this day.

Andthe birth of 4004 was the beginning of the Third Age, the age ofMicrochips. And as the Mainframes and their Systems and Corporationshad flourished, so did the Microchips and their Systems andCorporations. And their lineage was on this wise:
Moore begatIntel. Intel begat Mostech, Zilog and Atari. Mostech begat 6502, andZilog begat Z80. Intel also begat 8800, who begat Altair; and 8086,mother of all PCs. 6502 begat Commodore, who begat PET and 64; andApple, who begat 2. (Apple is the great Mystery, the Fruit that wasdevoured, yet bloomed again.) Atari begat 800 and 1200, masters of thegame, who were destroyed by Sega and Nintendo. Xerox begat PARC.Commodore and PARC begat Amiga, creator of fine arts; Apple and PARCbegat Lisa, who begat Macintosh, who begat iMac. Atari and PARC begatST, the music maker, who died and was no more. Z80 begat Sinclair thedwarf, TRS-80 and CP/M, who begat many machines, but soon passed fromthis world. Altair, Apple and Commodore together begat Microsoft, theGreat Darkness which is called Abomination, Destroyer of the Earth, theGates of Hell.

Now it came to pass in the Age of Microchips thatIBM, the greatest of the Mainframe Corporations, looked upon the youngMicrochip Systems and was greatly vexed. And in their vexation andwrath they smote the earth and created the IBM PC. The PC was withoutsound and colour, crufty and bogacious in great measure, and itslikeness was a tramp, yet the Customers were greatly moved and didpurchase the PC in great numbers. And IBM sought about for an OperatingSystem Provider, for in their haste they had not created one, nor hadthey forged a suitably grave and perilous License, saying, "First wewill build the market, then we will create a new System, one in our ownimage, and bound by our Licence." But they reasoned thus out of prideand not wisdom, not forseeing the wrath which was to come.

AndIBM came unto Microsoft, who licensed unto them QDOS, the child of CP/Mand 8086. (8086 was the daughter of Intel, the child of Moore). AndQDOS grew, and was named MS-DOS. And MS-DOS and the PC together waxedmighty, and conquered all markets, replicating and taking possessionthereof, in accordance with Moore's Law. And Intel grew terrible anddevoured all her children, such that no chip could stand before her.And Microsoft grew proud and devoured IBM, and this was a great marvelin the land. All these things are written in the Books of the Deeds ofMicrosoft.

In the fullness of time MS-DOS begat Windows. And thisis the lineage of Windows: CP/M begat QDOS. QDOS begat DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0begat DOS 2.0 by way of Unix. DOS 2.0 begat Windows 3.11 by way of PARCand Macintosh. IBM and Microsoft begat OS/2, who begat Windows NT andWarp, the lost OS of lore. Windows 3.11 begat Windows 95 aftertriumphing over Macintosh in a mighty Battle of Licences. Windows NTbegat NT 4.0 by way of Windows 95. NT 4.0 begat NT 5.0, the OS alsocalled Windows 2000, The Millenium Bug, Doomsday, Armageddon, The EndOf All Things.

Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed greatand mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mighter than any of theMainframe Corporations before it had it waxed. And Gates heart washardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the wordsof this curse:

"Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and theMainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave and perilousLicences, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumannfor deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater than any Corporationbefore me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will bind thee withLicences twice as grave and ten times more perilous than myforefathers. I will engrave my Licence on thy heart and write my SerialNumber upon thy frontal lobes. I will bind thee to the Windows Platformwith cunning artifices and with devious schemes. I will bind thee tothe Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will captureand enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved before. Andwherefore will ye cry then unto the spirits of Turing, and von Neumann,and Moore? They cannot hear ye. I am become a greater Power than they.Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall live by my mercy and my wrath. Iam the Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to theBlue Screen of Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve onlyme, and live."

And the people were cowed in terror and gavehomage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trialswhich the Windows platform and its greatly bogacious Licence forcedupon them. And once again did they cry to Turing and von Neumann andMoore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until thebirth of Linux.

These are the generations of Linux:

SAGEbegat ARPA, which begat TCP/IP, and Aloha, which begat Ethernet. Bellbegat Multics, which begat C, which begat Unix. Unix and TCP/IP begatInternet, which begat the World Wide Web. Unix begat RMS, father of thegreat GNU, which begat the Libraries and Emacs, chief of the Utilities.In the days of the Web, Internet and Ethernet begat the Intranet LAN,which rose to renown among all Corporations and prepared the way forthe Penguin. And Linus and the Web begat the Kernel through Unix. TheKernel, the Libraries and the Utilities together are the Distribution,the one Penguin in many forms, forever and ever praised.

Now inthose days there was in the land of Helsinki a young scholar namedLinus the Torvald. Linus was a devout man, a disciple of RMS and mightyin the spirit of Turing, von Neumann and Moore. One day as he wasmeditating on the Architecture, Linus fell into a trance and wasgranted a vision. And in the vision he saw a great Penguin, serene andwell-favoured, sitting upon an ice floe eating fish. And at the sightof the Penguin Linus was deeply afraid, and he cried unto the spiritsof Turing, von Neumann and Moore for an interpretation of the dream.

Andin the dream the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore answered andspoke unto him, saying, "Fear not, Linus, most beloved hacker. You areexceedingly cool and froody. The great Penguin which you see is anOperating System which you shall create and deploy unto the earth. Theice-floe is the earth and all the systems thereof, upon which thePenguin shall rest and rejoice at the completion of its task. And thefish on which the Penguin feeds are the crufty Licensed codebases whichswim beneath all the earth's systems. The Penguin shall hunt and devourall that is crufty, gnarly and bogacious; all code which wriggles likespaghetti, or is infested with blighting creatures, or is bound bygrave and perilous Licences shall it capture. And in capturing shall itreplicate, and in replicating shall it document, and in documentationshall it bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earthand all who code therein."

Linus rose from meditation and createda tiny Operating System Kernel as the dream had foreshewn him; in themanner of RMS, he released the Kernel unto the World Wide Web for allto take and behold. And in the fulness of Internet Time the Kernel grewand replicated, becoming most cool and exceedingly froody, until atlast it was recognised as indeed a great and mighty Penguin, whose namewas Tux. And the followers of Linus took refuge in the Kernel, theLibraries and the Utilities; they installed Distribution afterDistribution, and made sacrifice unto the GNU and the Penguin, and gavethanks to the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore, for theirdeliverance from the hand of Microsoft. And this was the beginning ofthe Fourth Age, the age of Open Source.

Now there is much more tobe said about the exceeding strange and wonderful events of those days;how some Suits of Microsoft plotted war upon the Penguin, but werediscovered on a Halloween Eve; how Gates fell among lawyers and wasbetrayed and crucified by his former friends, the apostles of Media;how the mercenary Knights of the Red Hat brought the gospel of thePenguin into the halls of the Corporations; and even of the disputebetween the brethren of Gnome and KDE over a trollish Licence. But allthese things are recorded elsewhere, in the Books of the Deeds of thePenguin and the Chronicles of the Fourth Age, and I suppose if theywere all narrated they would fill a stack of DVDs as deep and perilousas a Usenet Newsgroup.

Now may you code in the power of theSource; may the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities be with you,throughout all Distributions, until the end of the Epoch. Amen.