It might not have the relevance that Linux has gained, but Minix is an operating system that you can run today. Ymmv.
Tanenbaum laid out why his hobby OS beat out Linus Torvalds’ own pet project.
The primary reason why Linux beat out Minix, is that Tannenbaum wouldn’t allow Minix to win. There was a desperate need for an open source Unix-derived OS at the time, and many people wanted Minix to become that, but Tannenbaum wanted to keep it clean and educational. FreeBSD could have been it had Linus not created Linux, but he did so at exactly the right time for it to be embraced by the community and launched into the stratosphere.
Tanenbaum is still around
I mean, from what we learnt on university the “messiness” of a monolithic kernel seems “wrong” and a microkernel arch seems “better design”. Once you spend a couple of decades in the workforce and opening your mind… I haven’t seen a single “good modular design” that doesn’t suck balls, super bloated and with many performance issues just to make it “pretty”.
So, while I’m not claiming it doesn’t exist… I think is at the very least debatable.
Also, in 1992, when this article came out: you couldn’t just walk into Walmart and get a CD with Debian or Slackware on it (still cant but thats another story). If you wanted the latest reliable word processor, email, hardware drivers and access to excel you basically had no choice but to slap down $100 for a Windows or OSx install. Only enthusiasts, academics and scientists had the bandwidth capacity to download and update an entire OS in 1992. CD burners themselves were $10 000 in 1992.
TBF, in 1992 you might have had a hard time getting slackware at all since it was officially released in 1993.
However, when I first used it around 1997, it was just a stack of floppies, no CD needed.
It powers servers, smartphones, a growing number of personal computers, and at least three gaming consoles (Deck, Machine, Legion Go S), with more coming.
Windows was called obsolete (by me) years ago, and it’s abandoned (by me) since mid 2024.
That statement really has the same vibe as the one in the post. Well done.
In 1987, Bill Gates predicted in an interview that in 3 years time, 80% of new office systems would be based on OS/2, an operating system from IBM.
The first release of Windows was in 1985, so that Computerworld interview was basically Bill Gates calling Windows obsolete.
my kind of authority
“was called obsolete” - by 1 person who happened to be the developer of a competing OS/kernel.
Tanenbaum also believed that the Intel x86 was on the way out, the very CPU that Linux was hard-coded to run on. On the other hand, Minix was ready to adopt the upcoming RISC tech, which Tanenbaum believed would drive the x86 into extinction.
A genuine Nostradamus, here.
Kinda wish he was right about risc tbh
I would argue he was, but it’s taking far longer than I’d like
Depends if you count ARM too. I was always confused between RISC and RISC-V, and what ARM has anything to do. As I understand ARM is based on RISC, but its closed source. And RISC-V is based on RISC, but open source. Is that correct?
RISC isn’t a specific architecture, but moreso a design philosophy.
So is ARM. Every ARM processor is basically uniq, and that makes it efficient. That’s the point of it. RISC as a design philosophy doesn’t take over the industry, its specific implementations. My question is not what RISC is, but if ARM is based on RISC and how close it is in their designs to RISC-V. As I understand the company behind ARM took the RISC philosophy and created a closed source system.
ARM is a well-defined instruction set architecture (ISA), that in order to implement, must comply with that instruction set and be compatible with other implementations from other vendors.
RISC is not any sepcific ISA at all, but is rather a more generic term for any ISA that has a small amount of instructions.
RISC-V, on the other hand, is a well-defined ISA whose implementations are intercompatible with each other. RISC-V is a very specific, royalty-free ISA that comes out of UC Berkeley that adopts the RISC philosophy.
Interesting read: https://www.dfrobot.com/blog-13483.html
And was Linus’s teacher for Operating Systems in HelsinkiWrite the book on Operating Systems that Torvalds said inspired him to make Linux.
At university?
You mean docent I presume. Universities do not exactly have teachers.
Resident or visiting?
Nobody teaches at universities?! Must be a wild place to try to learn.
I think universities do have teachers, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway I misremembered and it was just that Tanenbaum wrote the OS book that Torvalds had during undergrad.
… and millions of phones 🙃
And your car and likely your fridge too. Linux is everywhere.
I mean, if it were for novelty and “cleverness” then it would be Plan-9 (or BeOS) the one who shoulda take over. At the end of the day both Linux.and Minix are both following the UNIX model which even at that time it already was “obsolete”. But reality is often more pragmatic
Honestly plan9 is neat but it suffers from being incredibly stringy and so does Linux / unix.
There’s some new paradigms out there that probably need to be uncovered. Computers have way more processing capabilities then they did in the 90s
More processing power means new paradigms are less likely to be uncovered, I think. The deficiencies of current designs are obscured, and maybe moot, due to the raw power the processors. There isn’t any real pressure to improve kernel design.
All of the big current kernels (NT, Linux, XNU) are rooted in the i386 era. There’s certainly been a lot of changes in all of them but I don’t know if any have been completely re-architected.
Might have to wait for some kind of completely new processor before we see completely new kernels.
The point was microkernel vs monolith
And it captured our hearts along the way. I bet few of us knew it existed in '92.
I had no clue how to operate a computer in '92. Pretty sure I had no clue what MSDOS was, much less what Linux was. Was a few years later that I actually got my first PC and started to learn stuff.
How? Torvolds released the Linux kernel in 91, lol.
Oh, maybe because UNIXWare 1.0 (System V 4.2) came out in 1992, the first major release in years. :P 🖕
It’s a old design shoe horned to do modern things. That’s fine but yeah… Obviously something more modern would be nice.
Linux obsolete before windows 95 , lol
Always has been
Called “obsolete” by whom? Microsoft?
Andy Tannembaum. Mi ix is microkernel. Linux is monolithic
I’ve been there with the MINIX debate back then. I’ve actually used MINIX on a job back then. Tannenbaum knows his stuff, but with that, he was completely off. I don’t think that most people in the Linux scene nowadays have ever heard of him or his OS. So much for relevance.
Reading is hard, isn’t it?
Especially when the linked article does not open, yes.
And it’s in the big bold title…
The image reads Andy Tannenbaum.
Ah, OK, the Tannenbaum discussion. Yes, we had good laughs back then.
No, Microslop called it a “cancer”.
That, too.
