Re: Recovering from bad disk ...

On Mar 10, 2011, at 8:18 AM, John Stalberg wrote
>>>> 
>>>> By the time Linus "invented" Linux that problem had been solved. ... those were interesting times.
>>> 
>>> "invented" == built upon Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix.
>> 
>> Yeah, but who ever heard of Minux except old Unix heads. I doubt many Linux users know what it is/was.  ... :)
>> 
> What? Linux and Minix are fundamentally different. The Minix predates Linux but one doesn't need two search hard to find them to be discussed by the original authours and by others were there are absolute concensus about the difference.
> 
> I submit a link to a foil hat who in his attempt to miscrerdit Linus and the Linux early coders with accusation about code theft acctually brought the Minix authour Tanenbaum on himself. 

At least through v0.97, Linux still looked and acted very much like Minix.  I kept forgetting I wasn't using Minix and was often surprised and delighted when function keys did what I expected them to do.

Next time I looked (some years later), all the Minix similarities were gone.

Perhaps Tannenbaum was just being nice (accusations of plagiarism are after all, frowned upon) -- I don't know because I never personally looked at the actual code -- but I've always assumed that Linux did in fact start out as a 32bit-only Minix (IIRC Minix would also run on 286).  Even if it is a mistake to make such an assumption, I cannot fault anyone else for thinking that because I've always thought that too.

-Michael