Lessons Learned from 30 Years of MINIX

[rogerbinns]

It was unfortunate how Minix was distributed as a $69 book. It was very expensive for a student. Inflation corrected it would be about $120 now. However being in the UK meant the usual 1 USD = 1 GBP conversion (making it cost about 50% more), not to mention VAT at another 15% on top - a total of about $210 in today's money. I am pointing this out not because the pricing was unreasonable, but because it was a big barrier to use. (At the same time a full version of Windows 3.0 retailed for $149 or $79 (upgrade) - 1990 dollars. You also required a copy of DOS.)

The article also mentions 32 bit support, but there was a lot of tension going on. It was possible to make Minix perform a lot better by deeper platform support and multi-threading components (especially the filesystem), but this made the code more complex, longer and harder to understand. Consequently there were two versions of Minix in use - the base true to the mission, and big patch sets on top that made it more usable/performant. The latter were distributed over the Internet.

This shows why Linux took off so quickly. There was no barrier to participation like paying for the book. While functionality was a lot less, there was no gatekeeper keeping it small, simple and educational. And Minix had shown how to collaborate with patches to an operating system over the Internet. It didn't take long for Linux to overtake Minix onto the path we see today.

[msbarnett]

> It was unfortunate how Minix was distributed as a $69 book. It was very expensive for a student. Inflation corrected it would be about $120 now.

And in a good example of how textbook prices inflate at well above the general rate of inflation, the current Minix 3 version retails for $176.

[ternaryoperator]

That being said, it was the finest textbook on operating systems available at the time and I expect still among the best even these many years later.

[justincormack]

There was also the UK ruling that VAT was chargeable on books with CDs on them, but not other books.

[jcr]

Down on the very bottom of the page is a seemingly mistyped link to the video where Andy Tanenbaum discusses the lessons learned.

http://cacm.acm.org/videos/lessons-learned-from-30-years-of-...

The above just redirects to vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/154212224

[snvzz]

Working archive: https://archive.is/lc5vT

[bluedino]

I could listen to Andy talks for hours. He has the greatest stories, so much experience and wisdom. I wonder if he and Linus get along in person, I had a 100% different impression of this guy solely based on his flamewars with Linus (who's probably the 'bad one')

[jacquesm]

I met Tanenbaum a couple of times when Minix was still very young, he's an extremely nice and knowledgeable person.

[ajdlinux]

Linus once introduced Tanenbaum on stage when he was the keynote speaker at Linux.conf.au 2007.

[hobo_mark]

In a parallel universe: ten years ago Andy gets his grad students to port MINIX 3 to ARM and turns it into the educational OS of choice for the Raspberry pi.

[krylon]

Honest question: Is somebody using MINIX as a production system? I suppose it is not very popular as a server system, but since its current target is embedded use, are there any products built on/around MINIX?

[phicoh]

In the early nineties, Kees Bot and I created a fork of MINIX called Minix-vmd. Some instances of that have been running production for close to 20 years now. Mainly as mail, usenet news, and http server and as routers.

[david-given]

Don't know, would be interested to find out.

FWIW: Minix 2 will still get you a fully functional Unixoid on a PC XT with 8086 processor and 640kB RAM. (It'll run in less, but I assume you want to run some processes in addition to the shell.)

And Minix 3 is a complete ground up rewrite, substantially more sophisticated, with a ludicrously small footprint and NetBSD compatibility (I believe it comes with NetBSD Ports).

[degio]

off topic but I think interesting: Andy Tanenbaum is also the creator and maintainer of http://www.electoral-vote.com/, which I find to be one of best resources on american elections.

[platform]

Thx for the reference. I had no idea. I presume it reflects Andy's biases (which is, of course, up to Andy)

  WRT Gov. Susana Martinez ....

  A good-looking Latina governor from a Western
  swing state  with a fiery conservative speaking
  style would be a good addition to any ticket.

  Comparisons will undoubtedly be  made to Sarah Palin,
  but Martinez is completely sane and is fluent in 
  two languages that Palin has little command of:
  Spanish and English.

[ryenus]

Is it just me thought it's hard to read a page w/o padding? Here is the rescue: $('body').css('padding', '0 15px')

[digi_owl]

TIL that Ts'o has been with Linux since the early days.

[yanowitz]

ObOriginalTanenbaumTorvaldsConflictLink: <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.minix/wlhw16...

Linus' personality is remarkably intact, 24 years later.

More background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

[nickpsecurity]

Relevant to their debate with modern elements:

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/reliable-os/

http://www.coyotos.org/docs/misc/linus-rebuttal.html

[digi_owl]

Interesting to see him come back further down the thread to apologize for his initial outburst.

There may be more than a few doing FOSS projects right now that could learn a thing or two from that.

[yxlx]

URL was corrupted for me. Working link: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/t...

[seeing]

Lesson. If marketing the product according to plan A does not work, invent plan B.

If you can make Minix run on a MacBook Air, AND get wifi working without me having to do anything, I'm willing to try it. Neither Linux nor FreeBSD have been able to do this.

[rubberstamp]

linux mint seems to get drivers right. have you tried it? almost 4 years now on mint. very stable to do dev work and web browsing without having to worry about malware. it's not perfect but so far it's the one OS that gave me less reasons to hate

having micro kernel and well architectured OS is great. but without equally good gui, usability suffers