[vox] Interesting thing i read today

[ME]

Richard Crawford said:
> John McDonnell wrote,
>
>> Yes, he took the idea of MINIX, but wrote it from scratch himself, then
>> unwittingly got people to help.
>>
>> Uhh... something like that - it's early.
>
> My understanding was that Linus wanted to create an OS that would mimic
> the functionality of Minix (itself created to mimic the functionality of
> Unix) so that he could essentially have a mini-Unix box at home.  And I
> think I heard that Minix was a licensed "miniaturized" version of Unix
> created for educational purposes.
>
> Linus released the first version of the kernel back in 1991 or so and it
> sort of took off from there.
>
> I might be wrong about that.  I sometimes am.

I belive you are correct about duplicating the function. You may want to
do a usenet search on the "Tannenbaum vs Linus" debates over the mach vs
monolisthic kernel. Thier disagreements were rather significant and at one
point I think Tannenbaum wrote to Linus that if Linus were in Tanenbaum's
class, Linus would have failed...