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."
What I remember (Score:2, Interesting)
More than Minix, I remember Tanenbaum for his "Computer Networks" textbook. Especially this:
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model."
Re:His epitaph in future years: (Score:5, Interesting)
I really miss the good old days when technical debates were over the merits and faults of such simple things as different kinds of kernels, and not about whether or not every single thing you do online is being stacked into half a dozen nation's permanent data storage facilities.
The Linus vs. Tanenbaum dustup is from a simpler, more positive age.
Re:A legend of OS design (Score:5, Interesting)
Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.
My first Minix install was on a 386-SX with a whopping 4mb of RAM I borrowed from work back in the early 1990s. I quickly abandoned Minix for Linux once it came out, but for several years I had Minix running on an old 386 laptop just for fun.
A great writer (Score:2, Interesting)
I own both "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" and "Distributed Operating Systems". When I saw the retirement announcement, I cracked them open for the first time in many years to recall how much I learned from them.
But my favorite of Tanenbaum's works is "Structured Computer Organization". I suppose it may be a bit dated, but I still recommend it to anyone who wants to know how computers work.
Re:Aaaaahahaha ... gotta love it: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Aaaaahahaha ... gotta love it: (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1992, on a small PC this is true. That doesn't mean it was true for a multi-user design. Remember that for a "small PC" the disk interface was ATA without (usable) DMA support and no of the later features to lower CPU overhead - this means that a good buffer cache implementation would provide better performance not only in throughput and latency of disk accesses but also lower wasted CPU cycles proportional to the size of the cache.
But using ATA also means that the performance of multi-threaded filesystems are unlikely to be much faster than a single threaded one, this because the bottleneck stays the same and also loads the CPU.
A bigger PC intended as workstations (yes, there were some) would probably use SCSI instead of ATA and then the situation is a bit different. But the original quote is still true IMHO.
What I remember (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but the best quote from that book is actually this one:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
In my networks class, we extended the calculation to a 747 full of DVDs (the best we could do at the time). Maybe one of these days, if I have a minute, I'll go back and do an A380 full of flash drives.
Re:A legend of OS design (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of the reason I used Minix was I had an old second hand 286. because I couldn't afford one of the new-fangled 386s. Computers where bloody expensive back then! At the time I had started using a local BBS called "Omen" which had just gotten a brand spanking new ISDN connection to this new thing called "ARPAnet" (aka "Australian research something something net") , aka the australian wing of the internet, and it had two amazing features 1) IRC, 2) Usenet (There was also Gopher but eh..... Usenet was better indexed and also had hilarious flame wars). Anyway it struck me that if I had a unix I could get a SLIP connection to the internet and run IRC *and* Usenet simultaneously using the magical wonder of multitasking. Omen was using Linux (very very brand new) but since I didnt have a 386 I couldnt use it. So I grabbed Minix, since I couldnt afford Xenix or SCO Unix (Pre SCO getting brought out by Caldera and then turning cthulhu it was a great company).
Problem is Minix didnt have a network stack :(
Minix on Atari ST (Score:4, Interesting)
I ran Minix for a year or more on my Atari ST - having a UNIX-like operating system on a machine I could have at home was a truly awesome thing. Tanenbaum's work is fascinating, useful and will be around for a good while...which is more or less the definition of "successful" in academic circles.
The debates with Linus were interesting - but I always felt that they were arguing at cross-purposes. Linus wanted a quick implementation of something indistinguishable from "real UNIX" - Tanenbaum wanted something beautiful and elegant. Both got what they wanted - there was (and continues to be) no reason why they can't both continue to exist and be useful.
Tanenbaum's statement that the computer would mostly be running one program at a time was clearly unreasonable for a PC - but think about phones or embedded controllers like BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi? Perhaps Minix is a better solution in those kinds of applications?
Re:Does this mean the death of Minix3? (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel it necessary to point out, though, that OS X is not a microkernel system comparable to Minix. OS X is largely monolithic, so if one part of the core system crashes, the whole system crashes. Minix 3 is far more ambitious because everything that is not in the (truly tiny) microkernel runs as a separate server process. For example, drivers are running in their own process, so if a driver crashes, the rest of the system can continue running.
To manage the system, Minix has a so-called "reincarnation server" that restarts core system daemons if they go down unexpectedly. It's totally modular and redundant -- far more ambitious and advanced in its design than Linux or OS X. Minix is designed from the beginning to never go down. There is nothing else like that in the Unix world.
This talk by Tanenbaum describes the Minix 3 design in much greater detail:
Youtube: MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System [youtube.com]
Class Act (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember when Microsoft paid Ken Brown throug the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution to do a hatchet job on Linus claiming that Linux was stolen from MINIX. Now Tanenbaum, who has criticized the Linux kernel design and had some spirited exchanges with Linus, could have just said nothing and let Linus fend the FUD off by himself, but instead he stepped up and did the honorable thing by decimating Brown's arguments that Linus could have come up with the Linux kernel in just a year and his competency as a researcher/writer.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/rebuttal/
Remembering an early 80s Tannenbaum presentation (Score:2, Interesting)
In the early 80s, I did a Unix systems startup in the UK: we were an early licensee of Unix from AT&T and sold VAXen with BSD installed and supported. DEC UK hated us. DEC US happily sold us CPUs.
In April 1983, the European Unix User's Group (EUUG), held a conference in Bonn, Germany. The speakers included Bill Joy, Sam Leffler, Steve Bourne and Andy Tanenbaum.
It was a hugely memorable event, including Prof. Tanenbaum's presentation. We were paying AT&T $200 or so for each Unix license. Not a huge deal for a $100,000 VAX system. But, even then, many of us could see a future where Unix or something like it would run on countless devices, including cars and washing machines. In fact, when I worked for AT&T in 1984 (yes, I know, it was "a learning experience"), I was pitching exactly that to OEMs. It was clear that something cheap or free would be required. So, back in 1983, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Prof. Tanenbaum gave us all the seed of a thought that free (as in beer) software could change the world.
As an aside, his presentation was a little hard to follow, but worth the effort, because his English wasn't that great. A Dutch guy sitting next to me said that his Dutch was pretty sketchy, too. I have no means to verify this but, if true, he would join a small group of my friends and acquaintances who don't speak any (human) language well. They're all engineers :-).
I also learned that, despite Bonn being largely flooded because of heavy rains, nothing stops a Unix conference, and that the "Geoffnet" signs I saw all over the place weren't a promotion for a new network stack, but meant "Open" in German.
Remembering an early 80s Tanenbaum presentation (Score:5, Interesting)
D'oh. Accidentally posted as a Coward and misspelled Prof. Tanenbaum's name. Carry on....
In the early 80s, I did a Unix systems startup in the UK: we were an early licensee of Unix from AT&T and sold VAXen with BSD installed and supported. DEC UK hated us. DEC US happily sold us CPUs.
In April 1983, the European Unix User's Group (EUUG), held a conference in Bonn, Germany. The speakers included Bill Joy, Sam Leffler, Steve Bourne and Andy Tanenbaum.
It was a hugely memorable event, including Prof. Tanenbaum's presentation. We were paying AT&T $200 or so for each Unix license. Not a huge deal for a $100,000 VAX system. But, even then, many of us could see a future where Unix or something like it would run on countless devices, including cars and washing machines. In fact, when I worked for AT&T in 1984 (yes, I know, it was "a learning experience"), I was pitching exactly that to OEMs. It was clear that something cheap or free would be required. So, back in 1983, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Prof. Tanenbaum gave us all the seed of a thought that free (as in beer) software could change the world.
As an aside, his presentation was a little hard to follow, but worth the effort, because his English wasn't that great. A Dutch guy sitting next to me said that his Dutch was pretty sketchy, too. I have no means to verify this but, if true, he would join a small group of my friends and acquaintances who don't speak any (human) language well. They're all engineers :-).
I also learned that, despite Bonn being largely flooded because of heavy rains, nothing stops a Unix conference, and that the "Geoffnet" signs I saw all over the place weren't a promotion for a new network stack, but meant "Open" in German.
Tannenbaum's predictions... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone else laugh themselves stupid at some of the predictions of the future in those posts? The idea that x86 would go away and GNU/Hurd would supplant Linux...
Predicting the future is REALLY hard.
I read your book! (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, his books are quite good, I used his the operating systems book in my undergraduate classes. I honestly found reading his book more productive than going to the classes.
Re:A legend of OS design (Score:4, Interesting)
Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.
Truly!
I first learned of Minix by reading about it in Byte magazine. At the time, I was an undergrad at a big US university, a member of the Association of American Universities [aau.edu]. The only multitasking computers on the entire campus were a Unix mainframe, a VAX, and a cluster (lab) of Sun workstations that only graduate engineering students could have accounts on. The Unix and VAX machines could be accessed using VT-100 (and later) terminals in computer labs spread out all over the campus. There were also BYOF (Bring Your Own Floppies) computer labs filled with DOS (pre-windows) PCs, and a few labs filled with early Macs, but those labs were mostly used by humanities majors hunting-and-pecking their term papers out.
Booting a multitasking unix-like OS on a personal computer was a huge deal back then.