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A followup from Andrew TanenbaumA followup from Andrew TanenbaumPosted May 21, 2004 23:37 UTC (Fri) by maney (subscriber, #12630)In reply to: A followup from Andrew Tanenbaum by rcbixler Parent article: A followup from Andrew Tanenbaum As you say, it's books versus operating systems (and Brown's math is still fubar). I'd just like to observe that even to whatever extent people might have bought Tannenbaum's book in order to get Minix as an end unto itself, they still aren't competing in the same market. Minix is, and always was, a toy built for expository purposes; Linux is, and long has been, a real, useful platform for getting work done. I know about Minix. Still have the original diskettes; ditto the separate (and pricey!) set for the compiler sources, so-called. It may have had value as a vehicle for demonstrating the art of microkernel design; as an operating system it was never running in the same race with Linux. Now, for sane people, the reason to buy Tannebaum's book is because he did a hell of fine job of explaining the design of a microkernel OS (much of which applies to non-microkernel systems as well, of course). For that, the genuine market of the book, I would have to suspect Linux had negligible or a positive effect. Negligible because if you wanted exposition, Linux wasn't in the running; perhaps positive because Linux may have awakenend an interest in the design of Unix-like operating systems and so increased the potential audience. I can't speak to that from my own experience: I was one of the fools who pursued Minix because it held out a hope of being Unix-like enough to be useful at a price I could consider affordable (Xenix, which I had used for some time at the office, was about as expensive as the PC hardware I then owned). After I came to my senses I went on to spend several happy years using OS/2 until Linux grew up enough to replace it.
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