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Xah Lee's Unixism

David K. Wall dwall at fastmail.fm
Thu Sep 2 21:55:52 EDT 2004 
Alan Balmer <albalmer at att.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 02 Sep 2004 20:58:34 -0000, "David K. Wall"
><dwall at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>
>>Linus deliberately tried to pay attention to the POSIX standard
>>almost as soon as he realized that his terminal emulator project
>>was turning into an OS. 1991 isn't all that long ago, but I'm 
>>not sure I would refer to it as "recent" in this context.
>>
>>http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991Jul3.100050.9886%
40klaava.Helsinki.FI
> 
> I don't know that the "interest" he expresses in this post proves the
> point ;-) However, Linux was based on Minix, and I think Minix was
> POSIX.2 compliant. 

Well, I'm in no way a Linux or Minix expert, but I do have a copy of 
Linus' book "Just for Fun", about the creation of Linux. Just by chance, I 
happened to pick it up last night and read a chapter or two, and read that 
same usenet post. So I'm pretty sure that the project was Linux. He didn't 
actually get a copy at that time, because he found out it would cost money 
he didn't have, so he used (IIRC) some Sun manuals for reference. Just 
adding a data point....

I'll snip the stuff about POSIX.4, because I'm completely ignorant of what 
is actually *contained* in the POSIX standards. :-)
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