On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 12:01:50PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > > AFAICT, Linux grew out of need for an _affordable_ and free POSIX kernel > > so that you don't have to spend billions just to run UNIX like > > OS. > > It grew out of one man's University homework, and dissatisfaction > with Minix (a tiny, "teaching" clone of Unix written by Linus' > Univerity Professor Andrew Tannenbaum. No, Tanenbaum was never Linus' professor. Tanenbaum teaches in the Netherlands, Linus was a student in Finland. During the famous Linus/Tanenbaum debates of 10 years or so ago, Tanenbaum said that if Linux had been written for one of his OS classes, it would have received a failing grade (due to its monolithic kernel architecture). You can find the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debates at http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/Linus_vs_Tanenbaum.html One interesting thing about them is that fairly early on, Tanenbaum criticises Linux for being closely tied to the Intel architecture. I find that a bit amusing, since I'm running Linux on SPARCs, PowerPCs, MIPSes, and ARMs. 8^) noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
Attachment:
pgpQy7gT1kQTP.pgp
Description: PGP signature