"was called obsolete" - by 1 person who happened to be the developer of a competing OS/kernel.
post
Windows was called obsolete (by me) years ago, and it's abandoned (by me) since mid 2024.
That statement really has the same vibe as the one in the post. Well done.
In 1987, Bill Gates predicted in an interview that in 3 years time, 80% of new office systems would be based on OS/2, an operating system from IBM.
The first release of Windows was in 1985, so that Computerworld interview was basically Bill Gates calling Windows obsolete.
... and millions of phones 🙃
I mean, if it were for novelty and "cleverness" then it would be Plan-9 (or BeOS) the one who shoulda take over. At the end of the day both Linux.and Minix are both following the UNIX model which even at that time it already was "obsolete". But reality is often more pragmatic
Honestly plan9 is neat but it suffers from being incredibly stringy and so does Linux / unix.
There's some new paradigms out there that probably need to be uncovered. Computers have way more processing capabilities then they did in the 90s
More processing power means new paradigms are less likely to be uncovered, I think. The deficiencies of current designs are obscured, and maybe moot, due to the raw power the processors. There isn’t any real pressure to improve kernel design.
All of the big current kernels (NT, Linux, XNU) are rooted in the i386 era. There’s certainly been a lot of changes in all of them but I don’t know if any have been completely re-architected.
Might have to wait for some kind of completely new processor before we see completely new kernels.
It's not a processing problem, it's a interface problem. Somethings are just easier to use or more functional based on how they are built.
Take a look at nixos, the large increase in compute has allowed for smarter package managers that can do complex validation.
Or rust for example and it's compilers. It's more expensive to compile then something like c but there's lots of benefits to its model.
Just because old things are cheap to do doesn't mean they can't be advanced. Everything is a give and a take.
I mean, from what we learnt on university the "messiness" of a monolithic kernel seems "wrong" and a microkernel arch seems "better design". Once you spend a couple of decades in the workforce and opening your mind... I haven't seen a single "good modular design" that doesn't suck balls, super bloated and with many performance issues just to make it "pretty".
So, while I'm not claiming it doesn't exist... I think is at the very least debatable.
Also, in 1992, when this article came out: you couldn't just walk into Walmart and get a CD with Debian or Slackware on it (still cant but thats another story). If you wanted the latest reliable word processor, email, hardware drivers and access to excel you basically had no choice but to slap down $100 for a Windows or OSx install. Only enthusiasts, academics and scientists had the bandwidth capacity to download and update an entire OS in 1992. CD burners themselves were $10 000 in 1992.
TBF, in 1992 you might have had a hard time getting slackware at all since it was officially released in 1993.
However, when I first used it around 1997, it was just a stack of floppies, no CD needed.
Tanenbaum laid out why his hobby OS beat out Linus Torvalds' own pet project.
The primary reason why Linux beat out Minix, is that Tannenbaum wouldn't allow Minix to win. There was a desperate need for an open source Unix-derived OS at the time, and many people wanted Minix to become that, but Tannenbaum wanted to keep it clean and educational. FreeBSD could have been it had Linus not created Linux, but he did so at exactly the right time for it to be embraced by the community and launched into the stratosphere.
It's more to the credit of RMS, who was looking for a kernel to join GNU. And he picked Linux.
1989 was when the GPL was written, so this followed a few years later.
There's no single individual that made it happen, but no doubt that Linus and RMS were the two biggest. Bear in mind that there were lots of additional contributors to the kernel and GNU as well.
I also think Red Hat was also one of the biggest contributors to Linux's success. So many of the most important technologies that we use today came out of RH. I don't have a lot of love for them today, but their contributions in the '90s and '00s was immense.
I actually think that a large part of the reason why PCs are much better open platforms than mobiles is because there is no Red Hat of the mobile ecosystem. Google started it out with AOSP, but then closed it up when they monopolized the market. Makes you wonder if RH would have done the same if they had the same kind of success.
Launched into the stratosphere is the perfect phrase for it. It's had decade after decade after decade of crazy effort put into it. I'm sure that when looked back on from a future era it will be remembered as the first true example of human collaboration without boundaries. Kinda neat
It powers servers, smartphones, a growing number of personal computers, and at least three gaming consoles (Deck, Machine, Legion Go S), with more coming.
And it captured our hearts along the way. I bet few of us knew it existed in '92.
Remember Windows Server? LMAO
Mac server?
It might not have the relevance that Linux has gained, but Minix is an operating system that you can run today. Ymmv.
You know this is actually kind of funny, cause I think it might be very possible that the roles between Tanenbaum and Intel could hypothetically be reversed.
There was a controversy a couple of years ago, with Wizards of the Coast and D&D, where they were planning on making a bunch of really bad and sweeping changes to the Open Gaming License. One of the controversies had to do with the license not having language for irrevocability, which Wizards believed allowed them to go ahead and deny people the right to make use of the old OGL moving forward, forcing everyone who publishes their OGL content to adhere to their new, more restrictive, license terms.
They never moved forward with the bullshit because the backlash was that bad, but supposedly licenses are not irrevocable by default, and so any license that lacks explicit language granting irrevocable rights can be susceptible to the same rug pull that WotC almost pulled.
And the last time I checked, guess which super permissive license does not grant irrevocability?
It'd only work if someone did it with some PITA dependency that no company wants to actually throw resources at, but it would be hilarious to see Intel or Amazon make a big hissy fit over a random MIT project used in millions of systems getting revoked lmao.
Bonus if it affects Amazon because they already refuse to use AGPL software lol.
The thing that concerns me is the precedent it can set. At least according to this source, MIT is about the 3rd most popular open-source license. If one rightsholder decides to pull a WotC, how many will follow suit? Honestly think that license is a potential minefield.
(And just want to point out, this is not a matter of permissive vs copyleft. I think it's more a question of competency. The MIT license is just not a very rigorously written license from a legal standpoint. If you are a dev who wants similar features to the MIT but more carefully crafted, then the Apache 2.0 license is probably what you want. Otherwise if you want the closest thing to opting out of Copyright all together, then the Creative Commons Zero public domain pledge is your best choice).
And lastly, the Hippocratic License is worth looking into if other ethical considerations are something you need as well.
That you do run today (even though you don't know it), most likely.
If you have a modern Intel processor. Some of us went AMD to avoid all that, although it's not exactly clear what's running in the negative rings of those either.
Doesn't AMD run Minix? What other such systems could it use?
AMD CPUs have something called a Platform Security Processor baked into their chips, and don't have Intel's Management Engine, so if there is even a full OS in there, and I'm not convinced there is, it's probably not Minix.
Not only Servers.. Most of the VR Headsets, many TV's, most mobile phones, a lot of automation systems, etc.
"...but ‘vector’ is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature." - Lord Kelvin
TBH a lot of Posix API stuff are designed around now obsolete hardware limitations, but nothing that can't be solved with some committee, that will design a new API, by committee.
How? Torvolds released the Linux kernel in 91, lol.
Oh, maybe because UNIXWare 1.0 (System V 4.2) came out in 1992, the first major release in years. :P 🖕
It's a old design shoe horned to do modern things. That's fine but yeah.... Obviously something more modern would be nice.
Called "obsolete" by whom? Microsoft?
Reading is hard, isn't it?
Andy Tannembaum. Mi ix is microkernel. Linux is monolithic
I've been there with the MINIX debate back then. I've actually used MINIX on a job back then. Tannenbaum knows his stuff, but with that, he was completely off. I don't think that most people in the Linux scene nowadays have ever heard of him or his OS. So much for relevance.
In practice, I don't think anyone predicted the market
Turns out 640kb was never enough
Minix in a sense is more successful than Linux as it runs in every Intel as a backdoor for the NSA.
Not sure if Minix is still used as a teaching OS but I'm the textbook is still likely around.

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