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on the gender acceleration blackpaper
updated ⏬?⏬?⏬
There are some little bits of the Gender Acceleration Blackpaper on which I'd like to elaborate.
- "In 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower appoints MIT president James Killian as Presidential Assistant for Science and creates ARPA (later to become DARPA)."
- "Despite the consensus among academics at the time that computer science was essentially an oxymoron..."
- Even in the mid twentieth century it was clear that computers would change the world; they could execute complex mathematical operations near-instantly without error.
However I don't have a source for this (yet; TODO).
- "Ultimately, Multics development was scrapped by Bell Labs in 1969"
- "This new operating system would later be named Unix — phonetically, 'eunuchs' — for being a castrated Multics."
- "GNU was ultimately completed in 1991 with Linus Torvalds' development of the Linux kernel"
- Linus's Linux was not the first attempt at a Free kernel.
See the GNU HURD, which was originally intended to be the final puzzle piece to the complete GNU system.
The HURD didn't catch on though and now Linux is generally the standard Free kernel used in Free operating system stacks.
- "Today, nearly the entirety of the Web runs on GNU/Linux"
- A technicality: it's a bit better to say "GNU+Linux" to communicate that one is running a GNU environment on top of the Linux kernel, in the same way one can run "GNU+FreeBSD" (a GNU system on top of FreeBSD).
This can disambiguate discussions of "GNU+Linux" (an operating system) from "GNU" (an organization or its operating environment) and "Linux" (a kernel).
But this is totally insignificant and pedantic to the point where it's meme fodder. Who cares.
- "almost every personal computing device in the world runs on Android, which is built on the Linux kernel"
- It should be noted that Android is Google capital.
The rest of the paper is of a more social aspect of which I don't believe I have much to say.