Back in the Day: Unix, Minix and Linux

I love historical pieces about technology. There's so much new and shiny all the time in tech, it's nice to reflect on where we've been.

Makes me want to re-watch Bryan's talk at Monktoberfest a few years ago on oral tradition in tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw

Articles like this always make me feel like I missed out on all the geek going on in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Of course I was a toddler when Xerox PARC was demonstrating their UI to Steve Jobs, and was in middle school when Linus was posting about his "(free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

So as I enter mid-life, I realize just how much I missed either not being old enough, not paying attention enough, or not having the means to get in the game. These stories of tech history, if nothing else, provide motivation for those, like myself, to get into the game and work on something useful -- and most of all something fun.

MINIX was special because the book was used in many universities to teach operating system principles.

MINIX also one of the few affordable Unix-like operating systems you could run on your own PC, and it came with full source (except for the compiler)

Linus was running MINIX when he created Linux.

And finally there the famous discussion by Linus and Andy Tanenbaum (the creator of MINIX) about how operating systems should be structured.

It's a working BSD licensed Unix like OS with a microkernel. Solid enough that Intel uses it for their management processors.

Before that time you needed very big iron to do much at all, so unless you were in the right place, as well as the right time, it was hard to participate.

I began on 8-bit micros (assemler...an assembler woulda been a luxury to us...we typed in machine code and calculated negative offsets in us heads..+) and also a PDP-11/45 running V7 when I was in middle school. My perception is that prior to the 11/45, 11/70 generation I would have had to have been very lucky to have a usable computer to program. Having said that, I remember learning Pascal over one summer holiday when I was a kid, but I had no computer capable of running a Pascal compiler until a couple of years later.

+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE