On Monday 25 September 2006 09:10, Tim Churches wrote: > >From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel ), in > > Torvalds own words: > > " * 25 August 1991 - Torvalds posts to comp.os.minix: [1]
Yep, well known post of amusing historical value. Often used to illustrate how a humble beginning can evolve into something enormous and entirely different, but irrelevant for the purpose you quoted. The Linux kernel by the time othe developers seriously joined in had already nothing to do any more with Minix; in fact even Minix' father A.T stated that he found Linux horrible and misguided Suggest you read up on L.T. vs A.T flamefest where they both slug it out critizising each other's design decisions: http://people.fluidsignal.com/~luferbu/misc/Linus_vs_Tanenbaum.html For starters, Minix has a radically different architecture (microkernel, clear separation of memory management, file system etc. from kernel) - something Linux is only now gradually approaching. In 1992, hardware simply wasn't fast enough for clean design, and Linux took the pragmatic route. OTOH, Linux allowed adding new hardware rather easily through a kernel interface - something extremely hard to do in Minix (and perhaps the main reason why hardly anybody is using Minix). Minix and Linux to me illustrate the battle between academia and pragmatic engineering. Of course the pragmatic engineer will take a leaf out of the academic book and benefit from teachings and research, but what they do and how they do it is very, very different from academic "solutions". Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
