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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)."
  - This is technically twice correct. From Wikipedia (because I'm lazy): "The name of the organization first changed from its founding name, ARPA, to DARPA, in March 1972, changing back to ARPA in February 1993, then reverted to DARPA in March 1996."
- "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"
  - When Bell Labs pulled out of Multics development, MIT and others stayed on.
- "This new operating system would later be named Unix — phonetically, 'eunuchs' — for being a castrated Multics."
  - The "eunuchs" homonym is interesting and ironic but neither of the three sources on Wikipedia for the "Unics" name being related to "eunuchs" mentions "eunuchs" at all. As far as I know, "Unics" was only a pun on "Multics" in terms of UNIX not yet being multiplexed, and the "EUNUCHS" puns came from outside the UNIX team - not really official as the blackpaper suggests. See ast's "Some Notes on the 'Who Wrote Linux' Kerfuffle, Release 1.5", "Emasculated Multics is Unics".
- "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; GNU+Linux systems, while Free, are not full GNU systems as originally intended.
- "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.