Re: [PATCH] x86: Deprecate a.out support

Geert Uytterhoeven
2019-03-12T08:44:50Z

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 10:46 PM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 2:34 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> > The main historic use case I've heard of was running Netscape
> > Navigator on Alpha Linux, before there was an open source version.
> > Doing this today to connect to the open internet is probably
> > a bit pointless, but there may be other use cases.
>
> The _really_ main version was that I decided to make my life easier
> for the initial alpha port by trying to run basic (tested) OSF/1
> binaries directly.
>
> Netscape may have been one of the binaries people actually ended up
> using, but it's probably not a reason any more, since the internet has
> moved past that anyway.

Yeah, the alphas on the server side, powering AltaVista, are also long
gone...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds