9 Jan
2017
9 Jan
'17
12:32 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 02:00:22PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
Have to keep in mind that Linus was at the time of course a student in
Finland, so outside the USA.
Outside the USA such BSD (or other *IX) source-code access on universities
and technical schools was not common is my personal experience.
At that time I was a student too and apart from MINIX there really was
little to no *IX source access available to anyone (BSD or otherwise) unless
for very specific research applications and needing to sign all sorts of NDA
stuff.
Buying a BSD license was way outside a student's budget at that time
and universities were not very forthcoming in giving them access.
As a result MINIX was actually making quite a few strides to get more
complex, but Andrew Tanenbaum always actively resisted turning it into a
'production' system as he wanted to retain it as an educational tool
(and the license agreement was quite limited to this purpose) pushing a
lot of european hackers towards this initially very rudimentary minix
userland-compatible new little kernel made by some finnish dude ;)
Quite a few strong discussions between Linus and Andrew at the time
on Usenet in comp.os.minix about the monolithic vs. microkernel
ideas.
Bye, Arno.
load it.
Which is sort of funny because it was not particularly
secret between most BSD users.
Given that the first person he mentions in the article is Bruce Evans,
it's difficult to understand how he hadn't heard of it.