by I was wandering by Byte's web site, and did a search on Linux.
There was a fair number of hits, but the November 96 / Web Project item
was interesting ... I quote a bit here:
``Plugging in the Linux Box
A few months back, analysis of the keywords used to
search The BYTE Site revealed that Linux ranked fifth [An earlier
item said third, after Microsoft and Java. Doesn't really matter...].
Clearly, a lot of visitors knew something I didn't, and
I resolved to find out what.
Today, a P150-based Dell running the Caldera distribution
of Linux is an increasingly important pillar of The BYTE Site. All our
conferences run there; INND supports newsreaders, and
Apache provides an alternate Web-based view. I transfer files between
Windows NT servers and Unix servers using Samba, a
nifty SMB utility that makes the Linux server look
like an NT peer file server.
And when I found that the key component of Metasearch
(a Perl 5 module called Wire.pm) didn't like my NT Perl setup, I didn't
waste time figuring out why. (A lot of Perl tools,
though in principle are portable, in practice work better with
Unix.) It was easier to
build and run Metasearch over on the Linux box, so I did. ''
A few points:
Linux is being used in conjunction with other systems. Interoperability
is key. Whoever plays well with the most others wins.
Computer journalists often do take long term looks at things. Depth
counts for a lot when you use something heavily for months.
And finally -- it's amusing that the article described doing exactly
what I was doing when I found it: searching Byte on ``Linux''.
Cheers,
doug.