> Linux is probably the last time something was really built from scratch.
Linux was started in 1991. Windows NT (whence Windows XP and modern Windows versions derive from) dates from at least 1993 (I don't know when the code internally started, but the first release was 1993).
For browsers, Firefox source code originates from Netscape 6, which was a rewrite from scratch and shared little to no code with Netscape 4 or earlier. This rewrite happened in 1998. IE dates from 1994, per Wikipedia. KHTML, whence Safari and Chrome ultimately derive, is itself from 2000.
Let's talk about programming languages. Java dates its early work to 1991. .NET Framework is the late 90s (Wikipedia is exceptionally poor with dates here). The LLVM framework dates to 2000 in the earliest. Accelerator programming languages like CUDA and OpenCL are deep into the 2000s in their genesis, and the development of more fully heterogeneous programming languages obviously postdates that.
That's a lot of significant projects that date way later than Linux.
Maybe so for Windows NT, but Linux 1.0 was released in 94. It feels strange because I was on the mailing list when Linus announced his project, and I had just gotten out of college when 1.0 became official.
And yes as well on anything serious that deals with modern CPU architectures.
But my point was that the old stuff has not been replaced, it’s still out there and often times you don’t have to dig much to find it. Particularly at the OS level, in memory management, multithreading, networking stacks and hardware drivers.
So the jungle simply becomes more diverse and nothing ever gets retired.
Lord, I came across a jumble of Perl code just a few weeks ago.
Linux was started in 1991. Windows NT (whence Windows XP and modern Windows versions derive from) dates from at least 1993 (I don't know when the code internally started, but the first release was 1993).
For browsers, Firefox source code originates from Netscape 6, which was a rewrite from scratch and shared little to no code with Netscape 4 or earlier. This rewrite happened in 1998. IE dates from 1994, per Wikipedia. KHTML, whence Safari and Chrome ultimately derive, is itself from 2000.
Let's talk about programming languages. Java dates its early work to 1991. .NET Framework is the late 90s (Wikipedia is exceptionally poor with dates here). The LLVM framework dates to 2000 in the earliest. Accelerator programming languages like CUDA and OpenCL are deep into the 2000s in their genesis, and the development of more fully heterogeneous programming languages obviously postdates that.
That's a lot of significant projects that date way later than Linux.