The early days of Linux
This is a great read of a humble start of history.  The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly.  Building it all towards a coherent system.<p>What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses.  Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy.  And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free.  Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption.  In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it.<p>By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.