20 Years of Linux: From Typewriters to Computers

This video is my contribution to the Linux Foundation 2011 video contest: Celebrating 20 years of Linux.

It was created using stop motion technique, and consists of 332 pictures taken with flash enabled in order to add some random artefacts and create grain. The typewriter being featured is an heavyweight Olympia Super Deluxe manufactured in the late fifties, which belonged to my grandmother at the time she was teaching touch typing: amazingly, it still works almost perfectly after almost fifty years!

Moreover, I only used open source software in order to render it, namely:

• ImageMagick: used to resize each frame to 1280x720 and convert it to grayscale
• eSpeak: a text to speech synthesizer, used to render the soundtrack from a text file
• LAME: used to convert the soundtrack to MP3 prior to encoding the video
• FFmpeg: used to join everything together and encode the video

For those having troubles to decipher eSpeak output, the text reads as follow:

On August 26th 1991, nearly 20 years ago, a Computer Science student by the name of Linus Torvalds posted this message on Usenet. He was writing a new operating system from scratch, which would later become known as Linux. At the time, a lot of people did not own personal computers and typewriters were not yet uncommon. During the next 20 years, what started as a one man effort became a massive community project involving dozens of thousands people spread all across the globe. Linux has become a modern and robust operating system running on a wide range of hardware and architectures. It is ubiquitous and widely used on servers, clusters, embedded devices, smartphones, and tablets. 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of Linux, and given the fast pace of its development, the best is yet to come! Linux, from typewriters to computers, 1991 to 2011 and beyond!

That's it! So happy 20th birthday Linux, and to many more to come!