[ih] Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX

[Dan York]

Thanks for sharing this! Definitely a well-deserved award!

On Jun 26, 2024, at 12:03 PM, Tony Patti via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

Andy Tanenbaum, creator of MINIX, has been recognized for his code, seminal
textbooks,
<snip>
Although you may never have seen MINIX yourself, there's a very high
probability that you've used computers running it.

I was a student at the University of New Hampshire from 1985-1989 studying Computer Science[1] and we were using all the various operating systems… UNIX flavors, VAX/VMS, PRIMOS/PRIMIX, etc. etc  All through the various terminals of the time.

Then somewhere in there UNH set up a whole lab of those good old AT&T PC6300 PCs… and for a course we got Tanenbaum’s book, “Operating Systems Design and Implementation”, and along with that came a copy of… MINIX!  (My 2024 brain tonight thought “oh, it must have been on CD”… but articles say it would have been on floppy. 🤦‍♂️)

The idea of running a *IX operating system on a regular old PC was mind-blowing, and I remember we who were CS majors spending MANY hours experimenting with it and seeing what all we could do.

That would of course set me up well for the all the many subsequent years I spent working with Linux!

MINIX was quite a great contribution!

Dan

[1] How I wound up graduating with a B.A. in German is a story for another time…

--
Dan York, Director, Internet Technology  |  Internet Society
york at isoc.org | +1-603-439-0024 | https://mastodon.social/@danyork

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