On August 25, 1991, Linus sends his famous message that he is working on a free operating system, but it will not be such a large and professional project as GNU . Among other things, it is noteworthy that this and other early announcements of his operating system Linus sends to the Minix conference, delaying the users of the latter.
Andrew Tanenbaum for the time being did not react to this at all, but Linux grew like a snowball. Already in January 1992, version 0.12 was released, in which page swapping to disk was implemented - something that was not in Minix. Soon after, the professor condescended to an upstart to personally answer him, and on January 29th Linus receives a message to the conference comp.os.minixwith moralizing content. The start was encouraging.
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
That: Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: LINUX is out of date
Date: 29 Jan 92 12:12:50 GMT
I went here for a couple of weeks to the USA, so I didn’t write about LINUX (not that I began to write if I were here). However, now I want to make a few comments.
As most of you know, for me MINIX is a hobby that I do in the evenings, when I get tired of writing books, and on CNN they don’t show any wars, revolutions or parliamentary hearings. My main job is teaching and research in the field of operating systems.
I could tell a lot about the comparative advantages of these two approaches, but suffice it to say that among specialists in the development of operating systems, disputes have already ended. The micronucleus won. Minix is a microkernel system. The file system and memory management are separate processes that operate outside the kernel. I / O is also performed separately. LINUX is a monolithic system. This is a big step back to the 70s. years .