InfoSec Person | Alt-Account#2

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • That seems to be the consensus online. But thanks for that tidbit! It feels even more bizarre now knowing that.

    I wonder why a handful of people think the way I presented in the post. Perhaps American/British influences in certain places? Reading books by british authors and books by american authors at the same time? Feels unlikely.







  • A Basil Plant@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml33 years ago...
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    2 months ago

    https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10754

    MINIX originally was developed in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as a teaching tool for his textbook Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Today, it is a text-oriented operating system with a kernel of less than 6,000 lines of code. MINIX’s largest claim to fame is as an example of a microkernel, in which each device driver runs as an isolated user-mode process—a structure that not only increases security but also reliability, because it means a bug in a driver cannot bring down the entire system.

    In its heyday during the early 1990s, MINIX was popular among hobbyists and developers because of its inexpensive proprietary license. However, by the time it was licensed under a BSD-style license in 2000, MINIX had been overshadowed by other free-licensed operating systems.

    Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history. It inspired Linus Torvalds to develop Linux, and some of his early work was written on MINIX. Probably too, Torvalds’ early decision to support the MINIX filesystem is responsible for the Linux kernel’s support of almost every filesystem imaginable.

    Later, Torvalds and Tanenbaum had a frank e-mail debate about the relative merits of macrokernels (sic) and microkernels. This early history resurfaced in 2004 when Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution prepared a book alleging that Torvalds borrowed code from MINIX—a charge that Tanenbaum, among others, so comprehensively debunked, and the book was never actually published (see Resources).

    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate