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The Linux distillery Happy mother's day, Linus Torvalds
The Linux distillery Happy mother's day, Linus Torvalds | Happy mother's day, Linus Torvalds |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 10 May 2009 | |
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Page 2 of 3 MINIX is a very minimal version of the UNIX operating system (and its name literally means “minimal UNIX.”) It was created by Professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.Featured Whitepaper
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MINIX was released as free and open source software and consequently put the power of UNIX into the hands of many for the first time. One such person was Linus Torvalds. Just as Torvald’s early home computing experiences inflamed his passion for how computers work, so too did MINIX inspire him. In 1991 Torvalds initially used MINIX to develop a terminal emulator so he could access the University UNIX servers from his own computer. He wanted to take advantage of the 80386 hardware and developed his program to run specifically on this hardware, independent of an underlying operating system. Before long he realised he’d actually developed an operating system kernel as a side-effect! On 25th August 1991 Torvalds announced this in a famous Usenet posting to the group comp.os.minix, Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-) Linus ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-( Meanwhile, back in 1983, notable hacker Richard Stallman started the GNU Project with the goal of creating a free UNIX-like operating system. By the early 1990’s this included a vast repository of software such as a C/C++ compiler (gcc), a command shell (bash) and many other pieces of work including Stallman’s own everything-but-the-kitchen-sink text editor emacs. Yet, the GNU Project was missing something crucial. They did not have an operating system kernel. Their intended kernel, called Hurd, failed to attract enough attention from developers. Torvalds later stated that had the GNU Hurd existed, or if MINIX – or anyone else – had a ‘386 kernel available he’d likely not have written his own. Great interest arose in what Linus had created and he made it available for download at the Helsinki University of Technology. The kernel needed a name, and were it not for a single decision we might be talking about Freax now. |
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