basic - continued

[sdavmor]

Joep L. Blom wrote:
> 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

I loved PASCAL. A fine structured programming langauge. And I was very
impressed by MINIX. I had Tannenbaum's book on MINIX way back when.
Thought it was very cool.
-- 
Cheers, SDM -- a 21st Century Schizoid Man
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