[crackmonkey] [dmarti@electriclichen.com: Re: [svlug] Tux => silly?]

[Seth David Schoen]

----- Forwarded message from Don Marti <dmarti at electriclichen.com> -----

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:09:24 -0800
From: Don Marti <dmarti at electriclichen.com>
To: Ira Abramov <ira at scso.com>
Cc: make bzlilo <svlug at svlug.org>
Subject: Re: [svlug] Tux => silly?

On Thu, Mar 11, 1999 at 12:39:25PM -0800, Ira Abramov wrote:

> so says a journalist on HongKong's computerworld (did I mention it's
> owned by IDG? :)
> 
> http://www.cw.com.hk/Comment/c990308001.htm

> But if Linux is to really fulfill the dream that so much of the
> industry has -- to be released from the shackles of Microsoft -- it
> needs to be approached with a lot more intelligence and a lot less
> silliness.  Otherwise it might just as well be OS/2.

This guy is right, of course.  OS/2 failed because it was too silly,
because its mascot was too cute, and because it had some witty
Scandanavian boasting that he wrote it out of laziness.

I never knew that about OS/2, so I looked it up.  The parallels are
amazing.  LarsOS (which, as OS/2 users will remember, was the name by
which OS/2 identified itself at boot before the actual logo came up)
was promoted as the "next big thing" by silly people worldwide.  Chief
among them was OS/2's creator, a wisecracking hacker named Lars
(forgot his last name but it was something very Scandanavian), who
originally wrote it to run rn so he could read alt.silly.silly.silly.

And who could forget Quacky, the once-ubiquitous OS/2 duck?  Because
poor Qucky was much less professional-looking than the "wavy window"
logo, developers abandoned OS/2 in droves and went over to Microsoft.
Today he can be seen only on old OS/2 conference T-shirts (Rick Moen
has one, I think.)

We'd better get our act together here, people -- before Linux goes the
way of OS/2.

-- 
Don Marti                                       Electric Lichen L.L.C.
whois DM683                                 -rwxr--r-- Harrison Street
dmarti at electriclichen.com                San Francisco, California USA

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-- 
              Seth David Schoen / schoen at uclink4.berkeley.edu
He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do."  And they
said, "Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the
nations." (1 Sam 8)  http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/   http://www.loyalty.org/
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