this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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H'okay, so.
There was this guy called Richard Stallman. Way on back in the day he was working with Bell Labs' UNIX at the university he worked for, and he got kinda butthurt about the extremely restrictive licensing terms and exorbitant cost that Bell Labs offered the OS for. So Stallman decided he was going to make his own OS with blackjack and hookers and offer it for free to anyone who could make use of it. The Usenet post he made announcing his intention mentions he knows someone who might get them a computer. He named his new operating system GNU, for GNU's Not Unix. It's a recursive acronym, which was popular at the time, it's apparently another name for a wildebeest or water buffalo or something, and it's an unpronounceable mouthful of socket wrenches, so it's the trend setter for free software packages even all these decades later.
They built a whole bunch of really important software; a shell, core utilities, a C compiler, and applications like emacs. But they never got a working kernel going, the actual engine of the OS. They worked on their own thing they called HURD (which of course is a recursive acronym they put more thought into than the software itself), they gave up and tried to acquire an existing one to use, then went back to working on HURD. They never really got a system off the ground for lack of a kernel.
Then a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds piped up and said "Hey I built an OS kernel for the 386 IBM PC, it's not as big or as professional as GNU, but maybe you guys'll find it interesting." He was persuaded to release Linux under the GNU Public License 2.0, and it wasn't long after that that the first operating systems built on the Linux kernel and GNU coreutils entered distribution.
Linux is the name of some software, GNU is the sound you make when punched in the throat, so people quickly started just calling this emerging ecosystem simply "Linux." Much to the chagrin of Richard Stallman who feels he isn't getting credit for his work. This is his punishment for being the absolute worst at naming things.
Hear hear! And let's hope he learned his lesson!
Great history! I can understand Stallman feeling like he deserved more credit, but he did come to be identified with the whole opensource movement as a consolation prize.
In the early 80s I was actually starting to get into Unix bigtime, but then at my my job we got a computer called a VAX that ran an OS called VMS. Everything was plain English and totally intuitive. Like if you wanted to print 3 copies of a file in landscape mode on a printer called Hulk it would be PRINT /COPIES=3 ORIENTATION=LANDSCAPE DEVICE=Hulk . Fully spelled out it was a bit verbose, but you could shorten anything as long as it was unambiguous. At the time I thought VMS was so much easier to learn, it would blow Unix right out of the water. Today VMS is in the dustbin of computing history. Not the first time I've been wrong lol.