January 9, 2026
Croissants, code, and chaos
Samba Was Written (2003)
From French Cafes to Hacker Shrines: Tridge’s origin story
TLDR: Tridgell reveals he built Samba by listening to network conversations and probing errors to decode Windows file sharing without official docs. Commenters crowned him a hacker saint, joked about oral tradition, and argued over title edits—proof that tech history fuels reverence, memes, and spicy debate.
Andrew Tridgell’s 2003 tell-all reads like a spy caper: to build Samba, the software that lets non‑Windows computers share files with Windows, he used a “French Cafe” method—eavesdropping on network chatter, then provoking “swear words” (error messages) to learn the rules. A “protocol scanner” tried thousands of command combos until servers finally said “okay.” It’s nerdy poetry.
But the community turned it into folklore. One commenter confessed their office kept a shrine to Tridge, joking he’s the “patron saint of hackers.” Another crowd erupted over HN title‑munging, griping that headline tweaks are the real villain of the day. Meanwhile, the café metaphor spawned memes: fans loved the image of stepping on the waiter’s toe to learn new curses, then argued whether this saga was written down or passed orally like hacker campfire tales—cue the deadpan “it was indeed.”
The mood swings between reverent and rowdy: half worshipping Tridge’s reverse‑engineering grit, half roasting the platform’s title rules, all while trading café jokes. For newcomers, this is a masterclass in how open‑source folks decode closed systems without manuals, and why that matters for everyday file sharing. It’s history told with croissants, chaos, and a dash of internet drama. Nerdy, scrappy, and iconic.
Key Points
- •Samba’s development leveraged public CIFS/SMB specifications, notably the 1997 SNIA-released draft authored primarily by Microsoft.
- •Microsoft’s CIFS IETF draft expired, and Microsoft ended attempts to standardize CIFS, but the documents remain useful.
- •Developers used a network sniffer to observe Microsoft client-server exchanges to infer protocol field meanings.
- •Error conditions were deliberately triggered to catalog returned error codes and understand failure responses.
- •A custom protocol scanner tried command words and varied data to identify implemented operations and required data structures.