Linked by Emmanuel Marty on Mon 5th Aug 2002 05:58 UTC
I've always been curious about how things work. When I was little, I annoyed my parents with millions of
questions. Why is the sky blue? How does water come out of the tap when you open it? Maybe I was born without the
mental switch that lets you be happy with using something, without trying to figure out how it works.
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Sometimes, I think that if computers hadn't been invented, all of these kernel hackers would be in their garages, creating amazing new engines for their cars.
Sometimes they'd be faster, sometimes they'd be more fuel-efficient, sometimes they'd be elegant but impractical, and sometimes they'd just blow up.
But it wouldn't matter. Nobody would be knocking them because they were creating engines that couldn't knock GM out of the marketplace, or that they weren't polished enough to be daily drivers. Their interiors might be ugly, and they wouldn't necessarily be comfortable, and they might run on pure alcohol or vegetable oil -- but the engine hackers would be having fun, and swapping knowledge and stories with other engine hackers, and happily driving around on the same streets as the minivans and the corvettes with a sense of pride that ordinary drivers lacked.
And once in a while, a Smokey Yunick (the closest thing to Linus that I can think of) would appear, and create something that made everyone sit up and take notice. The other engine hackers would look at their work, and use that knowledge to improve their work, and...
...ah heck, you get the idea. Run, boys, run -- get those hot rods running, and let us drive 'em around once in a while.