Tanenbaum, Minix was a clone of the commercial UNIX
operating system. Tanenbaum was a university professor who taught computer
programming in the Netherlands. At the time, there were three main operating
systems that were generally available:
?– DOS
?– Mac OS
?– UNIX
Windows was also on the horizon at the time. However, it was simply a shell
that ran on top of DOS. It really wasn??™t a true operating system yet. Each of these
operating systems was commercially developed. As such, patents and copyrights
carefully protected the source code for each product.
Describe the Background and History of Linux 7
At one point the source code to the UNIX operating system had actually been
made available to universities for teaching purposes. However, this practice had been
stopped. This left Tanenbaum without an effective tool to teach his students about
the inner workings of an operating system.
Undaunted, Tanenbaum set out to make his own operating system to use in
class. He developed a small clone of the UNIX kernel called Minix. His goal was
to provide students with a real operating system and its accompanying source code.
Tanenbaum even included the source code to Minix in his textbook, Operating
Systems: Design and Implementation (Prentice Hall, 2006).
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