Prof. Andy Tanenbaum Retires From Vrije University 136
When Linus Torvalds first announced his new operating system project ("just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu"), he aimed the announcement at users of Minix for a good reason: Minix (you can download the latest from the Minix home page) was the kind of OS that tinkerers could afford to look at, and it was intended as an educational tool. Minix's creator, Professor Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum, described his academic-oriented microkernel OS as a hobby, too, in the now-famous online discussion with Linus and others. New submitter Thijssss (655388) writes with word that Tanenbaum, whose educational endeavors led indirectly to the birth of Linux, is finally retiring. "He has been at the Vrije Universiteit for 43 years, but everything must eventually end."
Aaaaahahaha ... gotta love it: (Score:5, Insightful)
"A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack. When there is only one job active, the normal case on a small PC, it buys you nothing and adds complexity to the code. On machines fast enough to support multiple users, you probably have enough buffer cache to insure a hit cache hit rate, in which case multithreading also buys you nothing." - Andy Tanenbaum on the "LINUX is obsolete" Thread from 30 Jan '92
Nice to see a so called "expert" so far off. Seriously, not the first CS Professor to be completely backwards. I've met a few of those too. :-)
A legend of OS design (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people have the wrong impression about the good professor after the infamous exchange, but they miss that this is what academics do, and despite the flameyness of the exchange, Linus and Tanenbaum had a great deal of respect for each other. After all Linus was, for all purposes, Tanenbaums greatest student. I remember borrowing his book from UWA and getting the disks from the UWA computer club, following the instructions to get a functional minix up, then following his book to write a driver for my highly bugshit WANG (yes that was the brand name lol) hard drive controller. I learned more from that about how computers *really* work, than almost any thing I've ever learned. The difficulty of his book was notorious, probably the only books I found harder was Walter Pistons music theory book "Harmony", and Deleuzes philosophy text "Capitalism and Schizophrenia". And like those books, in its field Tanenbaums work shook the foundations of academia.
Enjoy your retirement old man, you deserved it.
Re:His epitaph in future years: (Score:3, Insightful)
eh, all that good old stuff is in a national permanent storage system called Usenet archives
Re:Multi-spindle PCs are not uncommon (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tannenbaum's predictions... (Score:4, Insightful)
X86 has gone away. Everyone is using X86-64 and Arm. I would be more Unix like systems are ARM than X86 or X86-64.. So is AMD64 X86-64 orX86/64? I can never remember.