[ih] The linux router project and wifi routers

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 8:39 AM Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:
>
> There is much to praise about the Linux Router Project, but it did not spawn Busybox. I wrote Busybox to create a two-floppy Linux installer for 3.5" floppy disks. This installed Debian. At the time, motherboards would not boot CDs, so we needed a floppy for the kernel and a floppy for the runtime before we could read a CD. Busybox was made to be that runtime. It was expanded by Erik Andersen at Lineo (and afterward)

Thanks for the corrections, bruce! (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox ) It's been over 10 years since
the GPLv2 controversies
around this died down, how do you feel about the current situation?

> and another embedded Linux company - the name escapes me.

Timesys?

It wasn't montavista (where I was), and I don't think handhelds.org
was involved either. But busybox certainly was a component in multiple
pocket-pc alikes in the 1999 timeframe, none of which I can remember
the names of either. I still remember jim gettys "unobtanium" vividly,
bulky ("is that a brick in your pocket or are you just glad to see
me?"), with a gps, wifi, and a barely working accellerometer, circa
2001... (ha! wired article on it:
https://www.wired.com/2001/11/build-your-own-franken-pda/ ) - people
were demoing X multitouch circa, 1999? but that too only barely
worked... but it was seething with potential, just like wifi was... at
the time, I thought we'd use X on a server, and display to the
handheld over wifi. The web hadn't taken off yet for much more than
dancing cats, and you had room to write real applications on real
boxes...

I spent many zillions of hours 1997(?) sshed into the handhelds.org
strongarm testbeds, porting code. Fun times.

> The Linux router project built upon it rather than creating it.

1998 LRP spawned a huge sea change in thinking for me. Instead of
trying to scale up non-mmu'd single system "embedded" images,
(windriver, ready systems, others) it proved WAY easier to scale linux
down and leverage all the QA and development work taking place
elsewhere. It took MONTHS for my roomate greg to convince me he wasn't
crazy... but the ease of use and a real scripting language in LRP was
a near-religous conversion for me. Busybox was really key, and if I'd
not thanked you for doing that before, thx!

http://www.rage.net/wireless/diary.html

I fiddled with uclinux only once again (on a pretty nifty DSP I'll
admit), but the 99.99999% chance of just one wild pointer, somewhere,
put me off of working without an MMU ever again, and once the wrt54g
landed, there was no looking back for any other form of router for me.
Cisco picked up montavista linux for their (NX?) product, and...

Haven't touched a box without a MMU since. IoT scares me.

>
>     Thanks
>
>     Bruce
>
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2022, 10:04 Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> which among other things, spawned busybox, I once wrote up my
>> intersection with here:
>>
>> http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.html
>>
>> I didn't know the cisco story was similar. How history repeats itself!
>> I don't remember a whole lot about the linuxrouter project (dave
>> cinege
>> had some odd ideas), but it was pretty foundational to the birth of
>> the embedded linux market as a whole. Similarly, the story of busybox
>> is not particularly well known, but it combined the most common unix
>> utilities into one binary that *fit* into the limited amount of flash
>> and memory available in the 90s and early 2000s in a form that allowed
>> for extensive scripting for complex functionality, compared to the
>> all-in-one approach of OSes like windriver's.
>>
>> There's also the handhelds.org project, which nobody remembers along
>> the brief flurry of app stores for linux-running handhelds in the
>> pocketpc era...
>>
>> And also, uclinux.
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:33 AM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
>> Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > EXCERPT:
>> >
>> > The following account of the real origins of Cisco Systems, as opposed to
>> > the history often recounted in Cisco company literature, was written in
>> > 1999 by Tom Rindfleisch. Rindfleisch was Director of the SUMEX-AIM project
>> > (1973-1990), under which the software for a powerful Internet router system
>> > was developed and widely deployed at Stanford and elsewhere for research
>> > purposes. That code found its way, without approval from the original
>> > developers, to form the basis of the Cisco router...
>> >
>> > Tom Rindfleisch
>> > Last updated April 8, 1999
>> >
>> > [...]
>> > https://www.tcracs.org/tcrwp/1origin-of-cisco/
>> >
>> > --
>> > Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
>> > living as The Truth is True
>> > --
>> > Internet-history mailing list
>> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
>> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
>> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC



-- 
This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC