Andrew Tanenbaum Gets an Award for His Work on MINIX
From ACM one week ago:
"Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Vrije Universiteit, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux.
"Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation.” MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000.
"Beyond enabling the success of Tanenbaum’s textbook, the impact of MINIX has been phenomenal. It was an inspiration for LINUX, which has grown into the most successful open-source operating system powering cloud servers, mobile phones and IoT devices. MINIX was also the basis for the MeikOS operating system for Meikotransputer-based computers and runs inside popular microchips. A later version of MINIX, MINIX 3.0 is intended for resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability. Beyond the direct impact of MINIX, Tanenbaum’s advocacy for microkernel design has impacted generations of operating system designers."
THIS morning we wrote about the former "deputy" of Torvalds or the "number two". He now works on his own OS, Fuzix.
How about Andrew Tanenbaum winning an award last week? It's starting to ripple through some news sites. Some of these present a photo op of Andrew Tanenbaum next to Torvalds, whom he inspired.
Some might say that Linux owes its existence not just to GNU and GCC but also Andrew Tanenbaum.
We've taken a quick look at many event photos from LCA 2007, where Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum met in person (one introduced the other ahead of his talk). Both can be found in standalone photos. Mr. Microsoft Mole was also there:
That's a GNOME shirt, so think Miguel de Icaza, who wanted to spice up GNOME with Microsoft and rebase it on .NET. systemd does something even worse right now. █
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