Hmmm I misremembered it then. Thanks for pointing this out.

My general point still stands though. His initial Linux announcement E-Mail has this line:

> It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

So it wasn't very portable at the start. If you complained about it not being portable to different arches (idk which one was available at that time? SPARC? MIPS?), it would have been unfair. Everyone has to start somewhere.

If anything Linus was extra-humble when announcing it, kind of the opposite of what's going on here. This kind of marketing copy would be appropriate for a mature product, as it is it rubs some people the wrong way.

Startups do the same thing for their first few years. Some companies never drop this attitude. Tesla for example promises a ton of stuff like self driving, or just building proper cars where it doesn't rain inside [0], but they haven't delivered none of the two yet.

Like it or not, people like this kid run the world.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0EgvaKrfIs

Should we all aspire to over promise and under deliver? The fact that many do and some succeed is not convincing.

Generally the advice I hear from more experienced people is to under promise and over deliver.

Everyone has to start somewhere but the website makes it appear as if this is way more mature than a humble start.

Yeah, I asked the question about porting to the Mac II and got my head bitten off in the newsgroup. Thankfully that brought me to NetBSD.