2022/04/24

John Lions Unix Commentary: Tanenbaum on public record noting 'book' was crucial to MINIX, leading directly to Linus, Linux, iOS/MacOS and Android.

To paraphrase Tanenbaum: "No Unix, No Lions Commentary, No MINIX, No Linux, No Android, No iOS/MacOS". 

Text file with links, commentary & edited video transcript

Andrew Tanenbaum, creator of MINIX, gave a talk at the UNSW John Lions Distinguished Lectures day on 29 July, 2021, which for copyright reasons wasn't uploaded.

A comment has been added to the "Welcome" video with links to the 2016 CACM article and MINIXcon talk included in the text file linked above.

Tanenbaum notes that AT&T changed the license for Unix V7 and after to ban books or teaching the source code. He was forced to develop MINIX, a functional clone of V7 and free of AT&T "IP", in order to again teach Operating System from the source, not theory only.

Tanenbaum wrote the O/S on and for an IBM PC, affordable for students, then wrote & published his book, with full source on floppies. In 1991, Linus bought a PC and began using & studying MINIX.

Linus then used MINIX as the development environment for early versions of Linux.

"Open Group", the current owners of the Unix trademark, have a "History and Timeline" page.

One of the best & most complete charts of the Unix Timeline is from Levenez. [Multiple PDF versions]

A much more complete history of Unix variants at Bell Labs and their descendants in the first 10 years by Warner Losh is "Hidden Early History of Unix" [PDF] from the "50 years of Unix" effort.