[listenfaster]

Good: split your time between activities and reading something as satisfying as the things you “devour”. To that end, I would plus one Hackers (Levy) and Code (Petzold). Also, the Cathedral and the Bazaar by esr

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

and other things from esr at

http://www.catb.org/~esr/

including the aforementioned jargon file. Here’s one I hadn’t stumbled on before, ‘Things Every Hacker Once Knew’

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/

For an activity ymmv depending on how much time you can spend; an alternative to building a computer from scratch, or an OS from scratch, is to buy a vintage cheapie running cp/m or dos, something where the OS isn’t abstracting memory management for you. Growing up in the 80s, I think managing my own memory and _everything_ that implies was the greatest teacher.

[AdamH12113]

Having gotten into computers in the early 1990s, I knew a lot of "Things Every Hacker Once Knew", but I did find something exciting that I didn't know in the discussion of ASCII control characters:

>ETB (End of Transmission Block) = Ctrl-W >Nowadays this is usually "kill window" on a web browser, but it used to mean "delete previous word" in some contexts and sometimes still does.

I tried Ctrl-W in a Linux console and it works! This will save me some trouble in the future.

[shadowofneptune]

Though the cathedral/bazaar terminology is influential, I am not sure reading the original text helps understand open source as it actually is now. It concludes that open source would drive out closed source software, when what we see is open libraries being much more popular than open applications. This is in part due to Raymond's own work at the Open Source Initiative. I'd probably be better for someone now to read a retrospective rather than a treatise.

[zozbot234]

> It concludes that open source would drive out closed source software

Relative to the pre-FLOSS era, this is exactly what has happened. FLOSS is ubiquitous today in systems software. Many of the current Big Tech companies and business practices simply would not exist without FLOSS computing infrastructure.

[shadowofneptune]

I agree. You said better what I was trying to say in that second sentence. It's more that for someone new to the theory of open source, reading a 1998 essay about a Linux email application gives the wrong idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the model.

[Tmkly]

these resources look great, thanks. also yeah great suggestion for buying a cheap vintange microcomputer!