"LINUX is obsolete" - Andy Tanenbaum, 1992 | Hacker News Reader

"LINUX is obsolete" - Andy Tanenbaum, 1992

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40 pointsdavid_xia14 comments

Its like a professor of classical music trying to describe why this "rock and roll" stuff will never catch on. It just goes to show that you can be correct and wrong at the same time.

Except that, unlike a classical music professor, the idea that Tanenbaum was evangelizing was not popular or proven.

"suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over."

A lesson for us all.

OT: Why does the new Google Group UI have to take up 1/3 of the screen with a FIXED header? Not everyone have a large desktop monitor. Lots of laptop users miss 1/3 of the screen to the useless Google branding. It's really annoying.

But when he wrote that stuff he was basing the "obsolete" statement on the monolothic kernel and x86 specificity. Those key aspects of the architecture _were_ obsolete back then.

I think when he wrote that he was right about the design being outdated.

Its just that Linux became popular and some of those design aspects like the x86 specificity were upgraded to newer ways of doing things.

Still monolithic kernel though. But just because something works doesn't mean that its an up-to-date design. Look at how popular fairly heavy and large PC workstations still are today.

i wonder what would've happened IBM chose cpm and motorola instead of ms-dos and intel. All this compatibility stuff sucks.

Being invented more recently isn't sufficient to make something better, it must also have compelling advantages.

Kind of duplicate from 2 weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744138

> But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a MODERN "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that.

The most important - and ironic - line in the entire email.

Not to start a 'Linux vs. GNU/Linux' flameware, but ironically, everything that [most] people associate today with 'Linux' is as much a product of GNU as it is of Linux (if not more so). Furthermore, GNU Hurd has stalled, so in a way, Tanenbaum's reasoning was completely wrong, but his conclusion was almost completely right!

Well, Linus did later sign: [1]

  Linus "my first, and hopefully last flamefest" Torvalds

Therefore this entire HN Item is flamebait - bait for flames.

The GNU project has been joined by many other allies with time-varying levels of "closeness." I would even argue that by now, *BSD is more closely allied with GNU/Linux than ever before.

The Free Software Foundation is generally respected for Richard Stallman's prescient take on modern issues of freedom, privacy, and trust. [2]

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/wlhw16QW...

[2] http://falkvinge.net/2011/06/03/stallmans-the-right-to-read-... but a little googling will turn up many, many more

> Therefore this entire HN Item is flamebait - bait for flames.

Exactly - makes you wonder about whether this applies to other 'modern' flamewars that we still have today....

Much as I think this whole thing is a bit unfair on Andy T.. the money quote has to be from Ast, in his reply to Linus:

"I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)"

I found interesting that ast uses a falacy strategy on his argument, specifically Ad verecundiam And ad hominem

Talking of obsolete operating systems, is gonna be fun seeing how riscos runs in comparison to linux on those raspberry pi thingys.

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