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Why HN was slow and how Rtm fixed it

(ycombinator.com)
257 points pg | 1 comments | 19 Jan 11 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mbubb ◴[19 Jan 11 22:23 UTC] No.2121511[source]▶
I find it disturbing to see people asking "Who is Rtm?" "Who is filo?"

I understand if you are in tech you might not know figures in history or literature... but these guys?

Every time you login to a UNIX/Linux system you use the passwd file and related setup - authored at least in part by Rtm's father.

http://www.manpages.info/freebsd/passwd.1.html

Rtm has done lots in his own right as the wikipdia pages show.

But seriously - if you don't know who these people are you really should.

Read this: http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/unixhistory

and maybe ESR's writings and that online anthology of the early Apple days and old issues of 2600, etc, etc

I am sorry - but it is really irritating to me that someone would be on this site and really not be aware of the deeper history and culture. It is not that deep - 1950s to present (to cover Lisp).

As Jay-Z (whom you probably know) says - "Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch and step up your vocab ..."

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1. viraptor ◴[19 Jan 11 23:09 UTC] No.2121686[source]▶
It's really nothing to get excited about. There are so many important programmers in the world that noone will remember them all. Not everyone works in the area where those people will mean anything more than a credit line in some tool they use... and that's fine.

I work with VoIP daily and could name lots of people who you "really should" know - you're using a phone all the time after all. Or people who create amazing stuff right now. But no... actually I don't expect that. Everyone has their own area of interest. I appreciate that someone wrote `cat` or one hundreds of other nice utilities, but I'm not going to read their history unless I've got a lot of free time and want to do that.