By the mid-1990's the Linux community was burgeoning as countless geeks
fled Redmond monopolistic oppression, Armonk cluelessness, and Cupertino
click-and-drool reality distortion fields. By late 1991 there was an
informal Linux User Group in Finland, although its primary focus was Linux
advocacy, not drinking beer and telling Microsoft jokes as most do today.
Kernel development continued at a steady clip, with more and more people
joining in and hoping that their patches would be accepted by the
Benevolent Dictator himself. To have a patch accepted by Linus was like
winning the Nobel Prize, but to face rejection was like being rejected
from Clown College. The reputation game certainly sparked some flame wars.
One of the most memorable crisis was over the behavior of the delete and
backspace keys. A certain faction of hackers wanted the Backspace key to
actually backspace and the Delete key to actually delete. Linus wasn't too
keen on the proposed changes; "It Works For Me(tm)" is all he said. Some
observers now think Linus was pulling rank to get back at the unknown
hacker who managed to slip a patch by him that replaced the "Kernel panic"
error with "Kernel panic: Linus probably fscked it all up again".
