On 21-01-2022 21:26, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 02:46:39PM +1100, terryc wrote:
>> On Thu, 20 Jan 2022 13:25:50 -0500
>> Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 06:40:13PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
>>>> On Thursday 20 January 2022 at 17:24:46, Peter Duffy wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, 2022-01-16 at 04:12 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
>>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E
>>>>> Thanks for the link to that - brilliant talk. I've always thought
>>>>> that Brian Kernighan himself was the great communicator in the
>>>>> UNIX group - I wonder whether "The C Programming Language" and
>>>>> "The Unix Programming Environment" would have happened without
>>>>> his obvious ability to take abstruse and difficult material and
>>>>> make it accessible.
>>>>>
>>>>> If I had one incredibly tiny nit to pick, it would be that he
>>>>> didn't mention GNU (it appeared once in the slide showing Linus'
>>>>> original email). Without GNU, it's reasonable to suppose that
>>>>> linux wouldn't have happened.
>>>> I disagree with "it's reasonable to suppose that".
>>>>
>>>> Linus Torvalds was building a system for himself, partly (I
>>>> believe) because he liked Unix but couldn't afford a Unix system of
>>>> his own, and therefore he was of course going to build it using as
>>>> much free (of charge) software as he could.
>>>>
>>>> That meant GNU.
>>>>
>>>> I think the Unix philosophy and design principles are beautiful,
>>>> and formed the basis of an amazingly efficient system, but some of
>>>> those principles are embodied in Linux and some are embodied in GNU
>>>> (for example, devices as files, and pipes, in the first; and tools
>>>> such as tr, cut, grep in the second), so these days we can't really
>>>> separate the two - Linux is nothing without GNU (although the
>>>> reverse is not true).
>>> And don't forget Minix, the system he used while developing his
>>> kernel.
>> Didn't Linus start what became Linux because Minix was only 286 capable
>> and was not going to be upgraded and Linux wanted something that
>> would run on 386 cpus.
>>
>> I think there was also a licensing issue involved in modifying Minix.
> As far as I know, minix came from Andrew Tannenbaum at the Free University
> of Amsterdam.and maybe also from the students in an OS course.
>
> I don't know the details, but it was at one point sold commercially, although its main purpose was for teaching.
>
> Whatever the licence then, it seems to have ended up with a sufficiently
> free licence for Intel to put a copy of it in the management engine in
> their CPUs for the last decade or so *without informing Tannenbaum*.
> Tannenbaum was miffed; he said the licence allowed this, but he would
> have liked to have been informed.
>
> -- hendrik
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I still do have the book and floppy disk from the 1.0 version somewhere
in storage. At the time it had a restrictive license and I had Sun and
HP systems to play with at work so I have not done much with Minix .
Later on I moved to Linux and forgot about Minix until I learned that
Intel implemented Minix in their processors ME which was a big surprise
(Indeed even for Tannenbaum!).

Grtz.

Nick