Linus' "relationship" with Dr Tanenbaum is detailed in Linus' autobiography "Just For Fun". VERY interesting reading indeed.
--Peter -----Original Message----- From: Jim Cheetham [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 16 February 2006 11:02 p.m. To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Postdocs, Ph.D. student wanted Doesn't anyone know their history round here? :-) Dr Tanenbaum teaches Operating Systems amongst his other interesting computing subjects :-) In order to teach Unix, he needed the sources; these were not available for his students to experiment with. So, he invented Minix - a Unix-like operating system designed to be valuable in a teaching situation. A copy is included with his accompanying book (probably should try to get that one day), and I think that is (certainly was) the only vector. Minix is a microkernel architecture ... so it's similar to The Hurd. Linus took an OS class elsewhere, and wanted to play with Minix - but couldn't get (or perhaps afford) a copy of the book. So he started his own kernel from scratch, which grew in popularity. However, Linux is "just" a reimplementation of the monolithic kernel style present at the time Linus was learning. Andy thinks it's a shame that all the energy that's going into Linux isn't going into anything truly innovative, in kernel terms. The Wikipedia article is a little light - I suspect the authors were only interested in him where his interests overlap with Linux. There's not much about his other acedemic work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tanenbaum -jim On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 09:09:47PM +1300, Zane Gilmore wrote: > Wasn't Andrew Tanenbaum one of Linus's operating system theory professors? > > I seem to remember him making comments about not giving Linus > "full marks" for Linux because he used a monolithic kernel structure. > > It was around the time that that guy was tring to claim that Linus could > not possibly have written Linux. > > > > > Jim Cheetham wrote: > >On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 02:06:30PM +1300, Carl Cerecke wrote: > > > >>Andrew Tanenbaum is a Big Name in the research field of Operating Systems. > > > > > >But not necessarily in the field of Linux :-) > > > >-jim > > > > >
