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Comment by 16s | Hacker News Reader

I got a good laugh from this quote: "[Linux] is not some crazy drug-induced microkernel"

That sentence is a betrayal of UNIX's history:

There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. (Jeremy S. Anderson)

I think it rather refers to MINIX.

More likely HURD

No, it was tanenbaum and minix.

More specifically, it most likely refers to this discussion:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_frm/thre...

Linus was a kid in 1992, and got scolded by one of the greatest icons of the field. That could still sting 20 years later.

I always thought Linus gave better than he got in that argument, myself. He was pretty brutal to Minix in a couple of places. BTW. love the reference to "BSD detox" somewhere in that thread, it always gives me a chuckle.

Yeah GP seems to imply Linus lost that debate. Quite the contrary, Tannenbaum titled his post "LINUX is obsolete", so the argument was fundamentally about whether he was right about his title, or whether he was wrong - the last two decades of history have pretty clearly proven him wrong.

[Regarding Linux's x86 base] What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. ... I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long.

Ouch, history hurts.

Yes, it refers to MINIX.

However, it is a betrayal of UNIX's history.

One wonders whey they left out Calvinism and the transistor...

When did Unix stop being a product of Bell Labs?

In 1916.

That was when AT&T first entered into anti-trust restrictions as a result of its anticomptitive practices in the long-distance telephone market, resulting among other things a 1958 DoJ consent decree preventing the company from marketing computer systems, which meant that in 1969, when Ritchie and Thompson wrote UNIX while at AT&T the company couldn't sell the software, and gave it away (with love, from Ken), resulting in most effective development moving outside the company by the mid/late 1970s (notably to UC Berkeley and MIT), a fact ultimately recognized by AT&T when it sold UNIX to Novell, who transferred the official UNIX trade mark to The Open Group in 1994.

Linux is not Unix?

No, Unix is a trademark. You can call your unix-like OS Unix only if you conform to SUS or something like that.

GNU is definitely not Unix.

All these years later, the flame goes on :p

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