'92 "Flamewar" The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate

[kf6rdn]

Ran across this whilst searching for something else. An interesting "flamewar" on the merits of OS design.

By flamewar, I mean in 90's "netiquette", a respectable, but earnest disagreement.

In todays forms, they would be best friends, since there's no insults thrown of the parentage, intelligence, "lowlifeness" etc of the participants, as we would have in todays "flamewars".

Linus even later apologizes for his breach of netiquette.

Interesting for the technical history as well as the social history of how forum participants conducted themselves.

[k5okc]

I still have my Minix disks and book. It was the peak of my C language learning years. I wrote a CRON program for Minix, and Mr. Tanenbaum said he was going to use it. Then I told him I found a bug in it, and have a new version.

No! He wanted the one with the bug in it! Ha. The bug was better for a homework assignment.

I think Linus has seen the error of his ways. Every day more and more of the kernel is offloaded into user space. Linus took Minix which was a highly modular program with a small kernel, and made a kernel where he threw in the kitchen sink.

Linux kernel today, is better because it is less.

[KA8NCR]

Tanenbaum is responsible for a lot of people's introduction to C and Unix. But Linus had a point that had yet to be fully discovered and that was up until the late 90's, no one had solved how to deal with the incredible performance hit micro kernels had because of the all the interprocess communication required.