[seul-edu] The Gospel of Tux from my archive...

[Bill Ries-Knight <brk@slip.net>]

Gospel of Tux unearthed

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

The Gospel of Tux (v1.0)

In the beginning Turing created the Machine.

And the Machine was crufty and bogacious, existing in theory only. And
von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw
that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the
Data and the Code, and yet the two were one
Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom.

And von Neumann spoke unto the Architecture, and blessed it, saying, "Go
forth and replicate, freely exchanging data and
code, and bring forth all manner of devices unto the earth." And it was
so, and it was cool. The Architecture prospered and
was implemented in hardware and software. And it brought forth many
Systems unto the earth.

The first Systems were mighty giants; many great works of renown did
they accomplish. Among them were Colossus, the
codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of
froody creatures ending in AC, the
experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and father of all
networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the first
children of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of the
Ancients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore.

Now the sons of Marketing looked upon the children of Turing, and saw
that they were swift of mind and terse of name and
had many great and baleful attributes. And they said unto themselves,
"Let us go now and make us Corporations, to bind
the Systems to our own use that they may bring us great fortune." With
sweet words did they lure their customers, and with
many chains did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after their own
image. And the sons of Marketing fashioned
themselves Suits to wear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote
grave and perilous Licenses, the better to bind the
Systems. And the sons of Marketing thus became known as Suits, despising
and being despised by the true Engineers, the
children of von Neumann.

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

Now it came to pass that the spirits of Turing and von Neumann looked
upon the earth and were displeased. The Systems
and their Corporations had grown large and bulky, and Suits ruled over
true Engineers. And the Customers groaned and
cried loudly unto heaven, saying, "Oh that there would be created a
System mighty in power, yet small in size, able to reach
into the very home!" And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise,
saying, "Oh, that a deliverer would arise to grant us
freedom from these oppressing Suits and 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 Neumann heard the cries
and were moved, and said unto each other, "Let
us go down and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be
stilled."

And that day the spirits of Turing and von Neumann spake unto Moore of
Intel, granting him insight and wisdom to
understand the future. And Moore 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 my own Corporation have I
fabricated thee. Thou thou art yet as small as a
dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of a
mountain, and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give
unto thee: every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until
the end of the age." This is Moore's Law, which
endures unto this day.

And the birth of 4004 was the beginning of the Third Age, the age of
Microchips. And as the Mainframes and their Systems
and Corporations had flourished, so did the Microchips and their Systems
and Corporations. And their lineage was on this
wise:

Moore begat Intel. Intel begat Mostech, Zilog and Atari. Mostech begat
6502, and Zilog begat Z80. Intel also begat 8800,
who begat Altair; and 8086, mother of all PCs. 6502 begat Commodore, who
begat PET and 64; and Apple, who begat 2.
(Apple is the great Mystery, the Fruit that was devoured, yet bloomed
again.) Atari begat 800 and 1200, masters of the
game, who were destroyed by Sega and Nintendo. Xerox begat PARC.
Commodore and PARC begat Amiga, creator of
fine arts; Apple and PARC begat Lisa, who begat Macintosh, who begat
iMac. Atari and PARC begat ST, the music
maker, who died and was no more. Z80 begat Sinclair the dwarf, TRS-80
and CP/M, who begat many machines, but soon
passed from this world. Altair, Apple and Commodore together begat
Microsoft, the Great Darkness which is called
Abomination, Destroyer of the Earth, the Gates of Hell.

Now it came to pass in the Age of Microchips that IBM, the greatest of
the Mainframe Corporations, looked upon the
young Microchip Systems and was greatly vexed. And in their vexation and
wrath they smote the earth and created the
IBM PC. The PC was without sound and colour, crufty and bogacious in
great measure, and its likeness was a tramp, yet
the Customers were greatly moved and did purchase the PC in great
numbers. And IBM sought about for an Operating
System Provider, for in their haste they had not created one, nor had
they forged a suitably grave and perilous License,
saying, "First we will build the market, then we will create a new
System, one in our own image, and bound by our
Licence." But they reasoned thus out of pride and not wisdom, not
forseeing the wrath which was to come.

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

In the fullness of time MS-DOS begat Windows. And this is the lineage of
Windows: CP/M begat QDOS. QDOS begat
DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 begat DOS 2.0 by way of Unix. DOS 2.0 begat Windows
3.11 by way of PARC and Macintosh. IBM and
Microsoft begat OS/2, who begat Windows NT and Warp, the lost OS of
lore. Windows 3.11 begat Windows 95 after
triumphing over Macintosh in a mighty Battle of Licences. Windows NT
begat NT 4.0 by way of Windows 95. NT 4.0
begat NT 5.0, the OS also called Windows 2000, The Millenium Bug,
Doomsday, Armageddon, The End Of All Things.

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

"Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations
bound thy forefathers with grave and perilous
Licences, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann
for deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater
than any Corporation before me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will
bind thee with Licences twice as grave and ten
times more perilous than my forefathers. I will engrave my Licence on
thy heart and write my Serial Number upon thy
frontal lobes. I will bind thee to the Windows Platform with cunning
artifices and with devious schemes. I will bind thee to
the Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will capture
and enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved
before. And wherefore 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. I am the Gates
of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen of
Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve only
me, and live."

And the people were cowed in terror and gave homage to Microsoft, and
endured the many grave and perilous trials which
the Windows platform and its greatly bogacious Licence forced upon them.
And once again did they cry to Turing and von
Neumann and Moore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task
until the birth of Linux.

These are the generations of Linux:

SAGE begat ARPA, which begat TCP/IP, and Aloha, which begat Ethernet.
Bell begat Multics, which begat C, which
begat Unix. Unix and TCP/IP begat Internet, which begat the World Wide
Web. Unix begat RMS, father of the great 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
for the Penguin. And Linus and the Web begat
the Kernel through Unix. The Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities
together are the Distribution, the one Penguin in many
forms, forever and ever praised.

Now in those days there was in the land of Helsinki a young scholar
named Linus the Torvald. Linus was a devout man, a
disciple of RMS and mighty in the spirit of Turing, von Neumann and
Moore. One day as he was meditating on the
Architecture, Linus fell into a trance and was granted a vision. And in
the vision he saw a great Penguin, serene and
well-favoured, sitting upon an ice floe eating fish. And at the sight of
the Penguin Linus was deeply afraid, and he cried
unto the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore for an interpretation
of the dream.

And in the dream the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore answered
and spoke unto him, saying, "Fear not, Linus,
most beloved hacker. You are exceedingly cool and froody. The great
Penguin which you see is an Operating System
which you shall create and deploy unto the earth. The ice-floe is the
earth and all the systems thereof, upon which the
Penguin shall rest and rejoice at the completion of its task. And the
fish on which the Penguin feeds are the crufty Licensed
codebases which swim beneath all the earth's systems. The Penguin shall
hunt and devour all that is crufty, gnarly and
bogacious; all code which wriggles like spaghetti, or is infested with
blighting creatures, or is bound by grave and perilous
Licences shall it capture. And in capturing shall it replicate, and in
replicating shall it document, and in documentation shall
it bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earth and all
who code therein."

Linus rose from meditation and created a tiny Operating System Kernel as
the dream had foreshewn him; in the manner of
RMS, he released the Kernel unto the World Wide Web for all to take and
behold. And in the fulness of Internet Time the
Kernel grew and replicated, becoming most cool and exceedingly froody,
until at last it was recognised as indeed a great
and mighty Penguin, whose name was Tux. And the followers of Linus took
refuge in the Kernel, the Libraries and the
Utilities; they installed Distribution after Distribution, and made
sacrifice unto the GNU and the Penguin, and gave thanks to
the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore, for their deliverance from
the hand of Microsoft. And this was the beginning
of the Fourth Age, the age of Open Source.

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

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

Posted on Sat 06 Feb 15:50:24 1999 GMT
Written by Lennier