[Ilugc] Re: Minix
- From: lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Chandrashekar Babu)
- Date: Fri Sep 10 22:02:12 2004
Sivasankar Chander writes:
Thanks for the info - that's probably how it installed and ran on both
an XT and an AT. It was exceptionally fast on an 8 MHz AT, but of course
there was no paging and both code and data were limited to 64k/process.
True. On my 386, it was faster than MS-DOS (atleast, in copying files, and
running small similar programs).
The trouble was, there was no easy way to merge the patchsets (and there
were many, in addition to the VM) into Tanenbaum's codebase to get a new
and improved version. That's one of the reasons Linux took off the way
it did (in addition to the GPL).
Yeah, for a long time, it was copyrighted by Prentice Hall with restrictive
licenses for redistribution.
But I do recollect that Minix was stabler and more reliable than Linux
for a long while, probably at least until Linux-1.0.9.
Minix is stable enough for what it is supposed to do, even today :-). The
best part is, it can run from a DOS prompt (or even within a Windows
command prompt window) just like any another application. This makes it all
the more interesting (a tiny UNIX on top of M$ OS without vmware/bochs/etc).
To my knowledge, Linux wasn't _stable_ enough until it actually reached
2.0.x (Perhaps, the network and I/O subsystems were stable though).
Still remember mysterious hangups on Linux 1.1 and 1.2 series while running
some heavy weight X apps (Corel WordPerfect, Wine, Enlightenment and so on).
I had considered it as a toy/hobbyist OS back then :-).
Cheers,
Chandrashekar Babu
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