When talking about the operating systems that have marked the history of computing, names like Windows or Linux are usually the first that come to mind.
But very few remember or know the enormous role he played Minix, an operating system that, despite being small and created for educational purposes, had a key influence on the creation of Linux and the free software culture that is so followed by many today..
Minix was created in 1987 by Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum, a Dutch professor with a passion for teaching and computing. Faced with the practical and legal problems of teaching operating systems based on Unix, which at that time was the standard, but a closed source, Tanenbaum decided to create a small, simple and open operating system that could be studied line by line in classrooms.
This is how Minix was born, the mini Unix that was designed to be accessible, easy to understand and usable on not very powerful computers.
What is Minix?
As mentioned before, Minix, whose name literally means mini Unix, is an operating system written to be small, simple and easy. It was created in 1987 by Andrew Tanenbaum with a very specific purpose: be a system that your students could study, understand and modify to learn how operating systems work.
At that time, Unix was the operating system par excellence in many universities and research centers, and was the basis for learning typical system architectures. However, its code and most of its versions were subject to licenses, so they were not accessible for educational use.
Wikipedia
In addition, real Unix systems required specific and quite expensive hardware for their time, problems that increased the barrier for students to be able to experiment practically.
Minix was designed to be very simple and could run on basic computers such as the IBM PC with an Intel 8088 processor.. Its code, with only about 6,000 lines for its kernel, was written following the microkernel architecture, which divides the system functions into small independent modules that run in user mode, something very different from the monolithic architecture of Unix.
This design also made Minix more stable and secure, since a failure in one module did not bring down the entire system.
Andrew Tanenbaum, the professor who changed the teaching of operating systems
Andrew Tanenbaum is not only the author of Minix, but one of the most important figures in the history of academic and educational computing.. Graduate and doctorate in physics, with specialization and experience in computer systems, he decided to face a practical problem.
Impractical classes and lack of access to actual operating system code were a limitation to effective teaching. For Tanenbaum, knowledge had to be not only theoretical, but also applied, and to do so he needed a system that could run on common hardware and whose source code was open and understandable.
With Minix he achieved this and he did it with an architecture designed to facilitate learning, which would also influence future generations of systems and programmers.
Thanks to his book and the release of the code, thousands of students around the world had real access to a complete and functional operating system, forever changing the way operating systems are studied.
The origin of Linux and the relationship with Minix
But be careful because this is where everything gets even more interesting. And in 1991, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds posted a message on a Minix forum announcing that he was working on a freely accessible operating system for his personal computer..
Torvalds explained that his system was a bit similar to Minix, but that was it. The truth is that I wanted to overcome the limitations of Tanenbaum’s system, which was intended for education and not for general or professional use.
This young developer created his own kernel, Linux, which maintained the monolithic architecture of the classic Unix system, and combining it with tools from the GNU project, he laid the foundations for what we know today as a global free software ecosystem.
Modularity vs. monolithic systems
Between Tanenbaum and Torvalds a debate arose within the technical community that focused on whether it is better to use a microkernel (Minix’s bet) or a monolithic kernel (Linux’s choice).. Tanenbaum defended the stability and modularity of the microkernel, while Torvalds argued that the monolithic kernel was more efficient.
For Tanenbaum, the most important and vital thing for a stable and secure system is modularity: «In a modular system like MINIX, the worst thing a bug in the audio driver can do is generate strange sounds or no sound at all. It can’t access the disk or the network, so the potential for real damage is much lower,» he says.
On the contrary, in monolithic systems such as Windows or Linux, he states that each component is so intertwined that an error in one module can lead to quite annoying and even irreparable damage, from crashes to serious security problems.
Without going any further, this battle gave him some displeasure, as he remembers a controversy with Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, who defended the monolithic kernel while Andrew opted for safer modular systems, although at the cost of some performance.
«In this sense, Linux won because almost all systems are monolithic. But given how insecure everything is, is that really a ‘victory’? Maybe it would have been better to make everything modular and a little slower, but much more secure,» he says.
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Tags: Education, Video, Computers, Operating systems, Windows 11, Linux