basic - continued

[Joep L. Blom]

Amedee Van Gasse (ub) wrote:
> On Tue, February 9, 2010 02:26, Christopher Chan wrote:
>> On Tuesday, February 09, 2010 02:17 AM, Rafiq Hajat wrote:
>>> Not Linus. Gnu/Linux was, if I understand correctly, started by Richard
>>> Stallman in the early 1980's.
>> GNU software first ran on Solaris. RMS and gang tried to build a kernel
>> for the GNU environment and are still trying (HURD - okay, a microkernel
>> but whatever) or at least some one from the GNU foundation is still
>> trying.
>>
>>
>>> Tero Pesonen
>>>
>>> Is that really true? I always thought that Linus Torvald was the
>>> originator of Linux, a term which comprised an amalgamation of his name
>>> and Unix (which is still used by the banks as the most secure OS on the
>>> planet).
>>> Am I totally off track?
>> No. Linux is from Linus Torvald but it is just a kernel. Not enough to
>> make an operating system. That is where GNU comes in.
> 
> Linux only became popular because Andy Tanenbaum didn't want to add
> features to Minix, and because BSD was slowed down by lawsuits at the
> time. If it weren't for the lawsuits, we would have had a *real* Unix
> (BSD) kernel, combined with the GNU tools. Nobody would have talked about
> Linux.
> 
> 
I second that. Tannenbaum was professor at the VU (Free University) in 
Amsterdam and had MINIX developed originally as an exercise in OS 
development for students just as Wirtz (Switzerland) had developed 
PASCAL for tutoring High school students. Both are/were however so
good that they were used in much wider circles, PASCAL is a much better 
( and stricter) language that C which also originally not was developed 
as a language but as a "sack of subroutines" by Kernigan & Richie (the 
in Bell Labs) to write a better OS that the then used RSTS on a DEC 
PDP-11. They called that OS UNIX.
Joep