Communix

By some random Communix users

The Communix operating system, short for Communication Oriented Maximized MultiUser Network Interactive System, was originally developed by two Germans, Karl Marx & Frederick Engels whom are two of the greatest hackers in 19th century. They released a version called Communix baseline (aka Communix 1.0 and 2.0), and compilation toolchain SH☭ (Sickle and Hammer). It was released under the GPL. Early supporters organized two international maillists, although the system had only been installed on a prototype machine.

During this period, the vast majority of countries used DOS, a legacy operating system that was popular in the days when hardware was slow. Only a small number of developed countries were operating on Microsoft Windows, as well as a few which ran entirely on thin-clients operated remotely from a Windows server.

Although machines that supported Communix were rare, there was much enthusiasm to see it ported everywhere. The earliest implementation of Communix took place in France in the cities of Paris and Lyon, but failed. Meanwhile, Windows’s fancy interface and powerful IDEs, as well as Microsoft’s aggressive marketing strategies, soon had it replacing DOS on many other machines around the world.

After the French failure, Communix development divided into two paths, one insisting on removing non-compliant code so that it could run on Windows; the other group, being anti-Microsoft, managed to implement Communix in Russia, led by the renowned programmer Lenin (The first working edtion is known as Communix beta, or alternatively Communix 3.0 Beta). This incarnation was so popular that at its peak it was deployed on 15 mainframes and more than 20 sub-nodes of a large-scale parallel Cluster, which sparked interest in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and other places.

On a side note, two of Lenin’s successors in the Russian Communix project disagreed as to how the final version, Communix 3.0 should look. The leader of the majority (the Bolsheviks), led by Stalin, emphasized system security and computing performance, and to continue optimization of the Russian edition on the existing Communix code base; the minority Trotskyites thought it was imperative that Microsoft was eliminated, and thus were in favor of supporting more hardware and architectures and to provide more functionality.

Trotskyism eventually failed, leading to Trotsky and his team forking their own version of Communix (known as Trotsky Communix or Communix 4.0), but apart from being briefly installed in Sri Lanka, its user base remained small. These users added a lot of customizations and patches, and the code-base was never standardized. After Trotsky’s death, the Trotsky Communix community fell into chaos and out of order.

Obsessed with security and efficiency, Stalin’s Communix 3.0 had an unfriendly interface and a poor selection of entertainment functions. Also, developing new features and updates proved to be very difficult, drawing many complaints from the public. This led to Stalin’s successor going to the other extreme, rabidly adding interface improvements and entertainment features–even going as far as to buy these feature packs from Microsoft–and completely abandoning the security and performance of the system, let alone code-optimization. This resulted in frequent system crashes and severe vulnerability to hackers. Finally Russia and the Cluster dropped Communix and chose Windows (rumors say the project manager in charge of the conversion, Yeltsin, took a lot of incentives in the process).

There’s one unique edition of Communix deveoped by Croatia hacker Tito, it forked from the Communix baseline and implemented a fair scheduling mechanism, so basically core process would take too much system resouces like Stalin or Mao editions, and there’s a nicely designed IPC so multiple process and share the same resource to accomplish a task. It has higher effeciency than Stalin or Mao’s edition.

Tito Commux was the best Communix in the 20th century, although it never reaches the design goal of original Communix. Yet lots of other Communix users are pretty envy of what Tito Communix can do. But due to different archetecture, the mainstream Stalin Communix users were unable to communicate with Tito Communix ever since 1948, and even attack Tito Communix. But Tito Communix proved its stable and performance, its uptime record of a half century. But it’s only popular on Balkan machines. Unfortionately after Tito dead, the Tito Communix was splited, movie users think Tito Communix ought to add more multimedia capabilities, game players want to add more 3D functions and travelers want to make it more mobile, there’s some fork in Tito Communix, and it turned into war, and at last surrendered to Microsoft’s commercial attacks.

Russia’s initial success with Communix encouraged its fans in China, but early efforts at implementation were not successful. One supporter, named Mao, said that a simple localization of the Russian version of Communix, because China’s hardware was too old and could not be updated in the short term. Therefore, it was necessary to rewrite the kernel and HAL to meet the hardware. This idea proved to be successful, and became the textbook example for porting Communix to old computers. Mao was also opposed to later modifications of Russian Communix and its surrender to Microsoft. In order to quickly clean-up non-GPL code in Communix, he launched Communix academies to encourage the chinese to use and develop for Communix—his goal was to create a “China with 600 million Communix hackers”. His proposal met with opposition from the main development team, but had enough of a cult-following that it has survived till now. Today, a coder with expertise in Mao’s version of Communix is often regarded as a dangerous hacker; in contrast many Certificated MaoCommunix programmers are actively coding for integration with Microsoft. However, in the world of open source, it is inevitable that the most popular code will be the most legitimate.

It has been said that Nepal’s version of Communix is “piracy”, which violates even the most fundamental tenets of the GPL, and has degenerated into a morass of Microsoft copyrights. The Korean peninsula is a hotly-contested battleground, with Communix and Windows occupying a 50% market-share after aggressive marketing campaigns on both sides. The Korean version of Communix, NKo, has been described as MaoCommunix-mini, which took Mao’s idea of optimization for poor hardware specifications even further, and is still in operation even today. It was rumoured that NKo was merely a thin-client that received instructions from China’s Communix mainframe, but since it has survived the crash and decommissioning of MaoCommunix this is unlikely.

Later, a programmer called Deng, based on the “Four Principles”, took 20 years to develop a program called WINE which could emulate the Windows API under Communix. His code was maintained and updated even after he left the project and version 1.0 was recently released. Unfortunately, WINE was not able to support all Windows applications—those coded with the “freedom.h” and “democracy.h” header files were notoriously broken. There are no plans to upgrade WINE to support this code at the present moment–thanks to Communix’s ability to support hardware interrupts it does not need to be a polling-based system.

In its earliest beta test, the system nearly crashed and the admins had to use `kill -9` to clear processes and reboot the system on 4th of June, 1989. All beta code was rolled-back. However, WINE running on Communix proved so popular despite such stumbling blocks that it was eventually adopted and dubbed “Deng Communix“.

Main criticisms of Deng Communix are that corruption at all levels of the code takes up a lot of system resources, and all Microsoft APIs have to be marked with “ms_” and treated differently in the system internals. Certain processes seem to be given a very low priority, notable cases being HumanRight(HR), Medical-care(MC), Right Of Abode(ROA), Pension(P), and PublicEducation(PE). Also, system performance is very GDP heavy so there is much pollution due to memory leaks.

Some major Communix milestones China:

In 1997 the first VirtualBox under Communix was developed and Hong Kong was successfully run on top of it. Two years later Macau was also transfered to China’s VirtualBox virtualization platform. Taiwan is also planed to migrate to it.

By 1998 most parts of Communix were connected to the Internet, but a Great Firewall was implemented to keep out undesirable elements, similar in design to the Berlin Wall which was uninstalled in Germany 10 years ago.

2008 was a key year for Deng Communix, when one of the most popular games on the Windows platform, the Olympics Game 2008™, was successfully ported to run under Communix. There had been a an earlier attempt to port this game to Communix in Russia 28 years ago but it was not considered a success, as many Windows users refused to play together with Communix users.

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Revision:
2010-01-18 00:41 Initial translation
2010-01-18 14:16 Revised by a redditor
2010-01-18 19:48 Suggestions from some other random ESL Communix users

Maintainer’s Note
This post is originally found on History and Joke board from ytht.net in PKU
Somehow I find it funny and translated it into English.
I am not a native speaker
So please DO feedback if you have alternative translations, grammar improvements or better sentence patterns.