From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arno.griffioen@ieee.org (Arno Griffioen) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2017 07:32:25 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] SunOS vs Linux In-Reply-To: <20170109030022.GE66746@eureka.lemis.com> References: <1483898537.3109544.841035897.5E751FC9@webmail.messagingengine.com> <61DAEC90-BE06-41FF-9B2B-D401CC8FC9F9@ccc.com> <20170109030022.GE66746@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20170109063225.7imw2tuiomsekvtn@ancienthardware.org> On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 02:00:22PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > load it. Which is sort of funny because it was not particularly > > secret between most BSD users. > > Given that the first person he mentions in the article is Bruce Evans, > it's difficult to understand how he hadn't heard of it. Have to keep in mind that Linus was at the time of course a student in Finland, so outside the USA. Outside the USA such BSD (or other *IX) source-code access on universities and technical schools was not common is my personal experience. At that time I was a student too and apart from MINIX there really was little to no *IX source access available to anyone (BSD or otherwise) unless for very specific research applications and needing to sign all sorts of NDA stuff. Buying a BSD license was way outside a student's budget at that time and universities were not very forthcoming in giving them access. As a result MINIX was actually making quite a few strides to get more complex, but Andrew Tanenbaum always actively resisted turning it into a 'production' system as he wanted to retain it as an educational tool (and the license agreement was quite limited to this purpose) pushing a lot of european hackers towards this initially very rudimentary minix userland-compatible new little kernel made by some finnish dude ;) Quite a few strong discussions between Linus and Andrew at the time on Usenet in comp.os.minix about the monolithic vs. microkernel ideas. Bye, Arno.