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Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

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Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#51

Post by asp_hornet »

jdougan wrote: post #47
alphabeta2024 wrote: post #11

I was failing badly in my computer architecture courses. Received a 5% score in one of the mid-terms. Switched from the recommended book to Andrew's book and did nothing apart from read it everyday for 2 hours. Received 100% in the final. Such an amazingly approachable book. :-)

Out of curiosity, which was the recommended book?

Not OP but if it was computer architecture i imagine it would be “structured computer organisation”.

One if my favourite books on computers and looking at the comments, many people here too.

Source: this book got me top marks too

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#52

Post by NonEUCitizen »

The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is also his work (along with Ceriel Jacobs):

  https://github.com/davidgiven/ack
Just as Minix perhaps could've been Linux, The Amsterdam Compiler Kit could've been gcc, but for licensing issues:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/10/firstchapters....

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#53

Post by guiambros »

LeFantome wrote: post #25
GTP wrote: post #21

It's funny to see how they highlight that it inspired Linux, ehile Tanenbaum heavily criticized it for not being a microkernel :D

Well, it “inspired” Linux because Linus was unhappy with Minix. Linus wanted UNIX and Minix was not what he was looking for. I don’t think emulating Minix itself was ever his goal. He chose the Minix file system originally but this was just pragmatic as that is what his drive was formatted with. The earliest versions of Linux were written on Minix though. Credit where credit is due. Interestingly, Linus was unaware o…

The whole flame war between the two is worth a read [1], at least for historical reasons; very different points of view. And while Linus disagreed with Tanenbaum's POV, I Tanenbaum's criticism to Linux made it actually better.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI#9f3c...

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#54

Post by Upvoter33 »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #39

I’ll never forget this. I was listening to a talk by Reed Hastings (Netflix Founder/CEO) at (I think was) Stanford. He was explaining how he came up with the idea of Netflix. A student asked: “when did you realize you had to switch to the internet”. At which he replied: “that was the idea from the beginning. We knew networks were going to become what they are today. Look, there’s a saying in a CS textbook that says:…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Has some pointers to the orig source

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#56

Post by snvzz »

boricj wrote: post #32
latenightcoding wrote: post #23

is MINIX abandonware now? Many years ago I tried to install the release that works (or comes bundled) with a light window manager but it was not trivial and it looked pretty abandoned even back then.

MINIX3's development has stalled years ago. Basically, around MINIX 3.2.0 (just before I stated contributing) the OS ditched its homegrown userland and adopted the NetBSD source tree + pkgsrc. While that boosted the software compatibility of MINIX3 in the short term, the maintenance burden of keeping up with upstream with such a large diff proved unsustainable in the long term, especially after the grant money dried…

Still waiting for that Minix 3.3.0 release, after so many RCs.

I followed the project somewhat, and I understand the main issue has been lack of having someone at the helm, pursuing this 3.3.0 release.

The situation is such that the release blocking bugs were fixed, and yet the release hasn't happened, because nobody is willing to put the time and effort to make it happen.

Should the release happen, and somebody be willing to review and merge changes and organize a regular schedule of releases (even with a long period, such as yearly), the system would no doubt get some life back.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#57

Post by eimrine »

I want to appreciate Andrew Tanenbaum for making possible the world's most popular OS, Intel ME. This system has been made absolutely right in every its piece except license. Minix under GPL would not let megagorporations to backdoor every functional x86 chip on the planet.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#58

Post by supriyo-biswas »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #15

His book “Computer Networks” was one of my favourites in my CompSci study days. Many years later I gave lectures on Distributed Systems at a business school and based the material on the book. Still feels relevant, even today.

Although this is a thread about Tanenbaum, personally I feel that Data Communications and Networking by Forouzan helps explain things in a better way and goes into the details of each network layer.

Modern Operating Systems is great though, and when I was in college I've recommended it to peers whose feedback was along the same lines.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#59

Post by supriyo-biswas »

ginko wrote: post #29

It's kind of sad systems research pretty much stopped at this point. I really was hoping that by 2024 I'd be running a distributed operating system where processes could be be freely migrated between my phone, desktop, laptop and NAS without too much of a hitch.

You should be looking at infrastructure related roles for this stuff; live migrations of VMs and containers are regularly done when you drain a VM or Kubernetes minion, for example.

For consumers, they mostly care about the user experience. Having software that syncs their contents to a server thus making it available to all devices has much lower overhead than trying to live migrate a process over unreliable networks.

Re: Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

#60

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

I came across Tanenbaum's Operating Systems book during my CS and it had a huge influence over me, till then I was a huge Windows nerd and after reading the book I felt like I was being cheated by Windows, like I was denied something which was rightfully mine.

I hated my labs as it had only Windows, started exploring *nix systems post class and never went back.

Thank you Mr.Andrew and congratulations.

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