MINIX
More info
- Creator
- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
- Released
- Type
- Operating system
- License
- BSD (since 2000)
A Unix-like system written as a teaching aid — and the one a Finnish student was running when he got fed up and started writing Linux.
Andrew Tanenbaum built MINIX in 1987 so that the full source could be printed in a textbook, since AT&T's licence had put the Unix code out of reach for teaching. The system was a microkernel: drivers and file systems ran as ordinary processes, which is pedagogically clean but on the hardware of the day slower than a monolithic build.
Linus Torvalds ran MINIX on his new 386, grew frustrated with its limits and wrote his own kernel in 1991. The ensuing exchange between Tanenbaum and Torvalds about microkernels versus monolithic kernels is one of the most quoted online debates in computing history. MINIX 3 lives on with a focus on reliability — and has ended up in billions of machines as the operating system inside Intel's Management Engine.