Roland McGrath steps down as 
glibc maintainer after 30 years Open source luminary Roland McGrath has decided “enough is enough” – after 30 years on the GNU compiler library project. As a teenager in 1987 – working back from the age he gives in his mailing list post, as a 15-year-old, in fact – McGrath began writing glibc, and he reckons that devoting “two thirds of my lifespan so far” …
It's actually quite usual in the Open Source world.
The thirty years is much more unusual. Few developers even had exposure to open source in the '80s: if he had not merely hardware but also connectivity as a teenager, it tells us there was something exceptional about his home and parents.
like KERMIT :)
I got Uni to pull a tape copy when I did my industrial placement. I put KERMIT on a Sperry 1100/70 (if memory served) and was able to pull/push files to a PC better than the supplied Sperry kit.
I then sent my modifications back to Columbia, where they are immortalised - with my name - in May 1987.
It makes it easy when people younger than 30 ask "what experience do you have ?"
Same recollections here.
In the 68xx / 68xxx world there were free compilers, OS extensions and other code described and distributed via notices and articles in the '68Microjournal, mainly for the FLEX and OS/9 operating systems. COTS hardware was mostly Tandy ColorComputer and Dragon machines, but a lot of us used single board or SS-50 bus based kit, either bought as complete boards or, more commonly, self-assembled from kits and debugged with multimeter and logic probe. That was quite easy with 1-2 Mhz clock speeds and and traditional DIL chips, but much more difficult and expensive now everything is tiny surface-mount chips and Ghz clock speeds: check out the cost of a 'scope capable of dealing with these speeds!
When we got modems we also got the Kermit remote access and file transfer system, maintained by Columbia University, but of course floppies distributed by sneakernet and post probably moved more stuff than a 2400baud modem could manage.
I'll bet you didn't know that Sperry/Unisys were open source (not so much since the "new brooms" post '86).
You paid for the O/S, but Sperry would let you have full access to the source so you could f*ck about with it.
They just said that if you did mess with the code, you did so via a provided mechanism. You could bodge the code directly, but you were on your own if you did and it went TITSUP.
Quite a shock for me to move over to an IBM technology that was black-boxed to Hellenbach.
"Exceptional. Right now I'm trying to remember the last time someone stepped down from something, on their own accord, while declaring that they do so because things will work at least just as well without them."
Carl Kasell, of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
Oh, you meant the prima-donnas infesting the computing world. Yeah. You're right there.
Thanks, Roland McGrath for your efforts. I'm not a 'c' programmer but thanks to people like you digging in, I have a brand new (as in about three hours old) Linux Mint up and running on a reconditioned laptop, ready to become both an evaluation of Mint and a lab for learning about Oracle installation (in the absence of actual training and/or a lab machine being provided for me by the idiots I work for).
Have a nice rest and do something that hasn't gotten old for you.
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