Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Benedict Torvalds Page A
Authors: Linus Benedict Torvalds
Tags: Autobiography and memoir
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$7,000, but the automakers reason that people who could afford $7,000 for a car are happier buying one for $10,000 that has extra stuff, like air conditioning, as standard equipment. If you compare entry-level cars this year with entry-level cars from fifteen years ago, they cost about the same. In fact, adjusted for inflation they might cost slightly less. But they’re a lot better.
That’s how it used to be with computers. When computers were not something that everybody bought, there was a pain threshold of around $2,000. If the lowest-cost computer is much more expensive, a company isn’t going to be able to sell many of them. But they were expensive enough to manufacture that it didn’t make sense for a company to make them much cheaper. People would always pay the extra $200 or so to get a better machine.
In the last two years they have become a lot less expensive to make. And even the low-end machines have gotten pretty good. Companies have lost many of the people who would pay the extra $200 for a slightly better machine. Since companies couldn’t sell on features alone, they’ve had to sell on price.
I admit it: Back in 1987, one of the selling points of the QL was that it looked cool.
It was entirely matte black, with a black keyboard. It was fairly angular. This was not a rounded, pretty-boy machine. It tried to be kind of extreme. The keyboard was about an inch thick because it was part of the same unit as the computer. That’s the way most of the home computers were designed. On the right-hand side of the keyboard, where you would have a keypad, you had two slots for the revolutionary Sinclair microdrive, which was this endless loop of tape that was used only on a Sinclair machine. It acted and was organized like a disk drive. Because it was one long loop, you could just spin it until you hit what you wanted. It turned out to be a bad idea because it was not as reliable as a disk drive.
So I spent close to $2,000 for the Sinclair QL. Most of what I did with it was one programming project after another. I was always searching for something interesting to do. I had a Forth language interpreter and compiler, just to play around with. Forth was a strange language that nobody uses anymore. It was kind of a fun, niche-market language that was fairly widely used in the 1980s for different things, but it never became very popular, being difficult to follow for non-techie people. Actually it was kind of useless.
I wrote programming tools for myself. One of the first things I bought for the machine was an expansion bay with an EEPROM card (Electrically Erasable and Programmable Read Only Memory). It’s memory you write yourself with special modules, and it stays around when you turn the power off. That way, I could have the tools easily available to me whenever I wanted, without having to load them into RAM (random access memory) and use precious RAM for programs.
What got me interested in operating systems: I bought a floppy controller so I wouldn’t have to use the microdrives, but the driver that came with the floppy controller was bad so I ended up writing my own. In the process of writing that I found some bugs in the operating system—or at least a discrepancy between what the documentation said the operating system would do and what it actually did. I found it because something I had written didn’t work.
My code is always, um, perfect. So I knew it had to be something else, and I went in and disassembled the operating system.
You could buy books that contain partial listings of the operating system. That helps. You also need a disassembler, a tool that takes the machine language and turns it into assembly language. That’s important because when you only have a machine language version, it’s difficult to follow the instructions. You find that an instruction will jump to a numerical address, which makes it very hard to read. A good disassembler will make up names for the numbers and also allow
That’s how it used to be with computers. When computers were not something that everybody bought, there was a pain threshold of around $2,000. If the lowest-cost computer is much more expensive, a company isn’t going to be able to sell many of them. But they were expensive enough to manufacture that it didn’t make sense for a company to make them much cheaper. People would always pay the extra $200 or so to get a better machine.
In the last two years they have become a lot less expensive to make. And even the low-end machines have gotten pretty good. Companies have lost many of the people who would pay the extra $200 for a slightly better machine. Since companies couldn’t sell on features alone, they’ve had to sell on price.
I admit it: Back in 1987, one of the selling points of the QL was that it looked cool.
It was entirely matte black, with a black keyboard. It was fairly angular. This was not a rounded, pretty-boy machine. It tried to be kind of extreme. The keyboard was about an inch thick because it was part of the same unit as the computer. That’s the way most of the home computers were designed. On the right-hand side of the keyboard, where you would have a keypad, you had two slots for the revolutionary Sinclair microdrive, which was this endless loop of tape that was used only on a Sinclair machine. It acted and was organized like a disk drive. Because it was one long loop, you could just spin it until you hit what you wanted. It turned out to be a bad idea because it was not as reliable as a disk drive.
So I spent close to $2,000 for the Sinclair QL. Most of what I did with it was one programming project after another. I was always searching for something interesting to do. I had a Forth language interpreter and compiler, just to play around with. Forth was a strange language that nobody uses anymore. It was kind of a fun, niche-market language that was fairly widely used in the 1980s for different things, but it never became very popular, being difficult to follow for non-techie people. Actually it was kind of useless.
I wrote programming tools for myself. One of the first things I bought for the machine was an expansion bay with an EEPROM card (Electrically Erasable and Programmable Read Only Memory). It’s memory you write yourself with special modules, and it stays around when you turn the power off. That way, I could have the tools easily available to me whenever I wanted, without having to load them into RAM (random access memory) and use precious RAM for programs.
What got me interested in operating systems: I bought a floppy controller so I wouldn’t have to use the microdrives, but the driver that came with the floppy controller was bad so I ended up writing my own. In the process of writing that I found some bugs in the operating system—or at least a discrepancy between what the documentation said the operating system would do and what it actually did. I found it because something I had written didn’t work.
My code is always, um, perfect. So I knew it had to be something else, and I went in and disassembled the operating system.
You could buy books that contain partial listings of the operating system. That helps. You also need a disassembler, a tool that takes the machine language and turns it into assembly language. That’s important because when you only have a machine language version, it’s difficult to follow the instructions. You find that an instruction will jump to a numerical address, which makes it very hard to read. A good disassembler will make up names for the numbers and also allow
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