> Rick Troth wrote: > > The story goes that Andrew Tannenbaum (Comp Sci professor and > > creator of MINIX, which few can dispute was an inspiration for Linux) > > criticized Linux as "out of date", being monolithic. > The subject line of the Usenet message on comp.os.minix in which he > responded to the appearance of Linux read "LINUX is obsolete". > Obviously a balanced and moderate observation, which has > meanwhile been confirmed by history. ;-)
Then again, when you look at Amoeba (Tannenbaum's next bit of cool gadgetry), he may have had a point. If you've never looked at Amoeba, check it out. Yet more proof that Andy Tannebaum is One Seriously Smart Dude. Totally distributed environment: distributed memory, single system image, distributed I/O -- his test environment was 300 nodes in 3 different *countries* all presenting a single system image to the programmer. You literally *didn't* know there were multiple systems involved. IMHO (and probably rank heresy here), Amoeba is way cooler than Linux. But, Amoeba is still an academic toy SO FAR, and Linux isn't. C'est la vie. >Andy felt very strongly about > the micro-kernel approach, and Linus felt very strongly that > that might be a theoretically nicer design, but with existing > technology not practically feasible (yet). One of the major reasons for the development of Amoeba.
