Slashdot Mirror
Prof. Andy Tanenbaum Retires From Vrije University
When Linus Torvalds first announced his new operating system project ("just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu"), he aimed the announcement at users of Minix for a good reason: Minix (you can download the latest from the Minix home page) was the kind of OS that tinkerers could afford to look at, and it was intended as an educational tool. Minix's creator, Professor Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum, described his academic-oriented microkernel OS as a hobby, too, in the now-famous online discussion with Linus and others. New submitter Thijssss (655388) writes with word that Tanenbaum, whose educational endeavors led indirectly to the birth of Linux, is finally retiring. "He has been at the Vrije Universiteit for 43 years, but everything must eventually end."
"Microkernels are still better, you little punk!" With an engraving of a shaking fist.
"Vrije" is a Dutch adjective, meaning "free". So either you write "vrije Universiteit", or you write "Free University". "Vrije University" is just silly.
"A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack. When there is only one job active, the normal case on a small PC, it buys you nothing and adds complexity to the code. On machines fast enough to support multiple users, you probably have enough buffer cache to insure a hit cache hit rate, in which case multithreading also buys you nothing." - Andy Tanenbaum on the "LINUX is obsolete" Thread from 30 Jan '92
Nice to see a so called "expert" so far off. Seriously, not the first CS Professor to be completely backwards. I've met a few of those too. :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A lot of people have the wrong impression about the good professor after the infamous exchange, but they miss that this is what academics do, and despite the flameyness of the exchange, Linus and Tanenbaum had a great deal of respect for each other. After all Linus was, for all purposes, Tanenbaums greatest student. I remember borrowing his book from UWA and getting the disks from the UWA computer club, following the instructions to get a functional minix up, then following his book to write a driver for my highly bugshit WANG (yes that was the brand name lol) hard drive controller. I learned more from that about how computers *really* work, than almost any thing I've ever learned. The difficulty of his book was notorious, probably the only books I found harder was Walter Pistons music theory book "Harmony", and Deleuzes philosophy text "Capitalism and Schizophrenia". And like those books, in its field Tanenbaums work shook the foundations of academia.
Enjoy your retirement old man, you deserved it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
More than Minix, I remember Tanenbaum for his "Computer Networks" textbook. Especially this:
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model."
"Vrije University" in the title sounds realy strange to me, as a native Dutch speaker. Vrije isn't a city, "Vrije Universiteit" means "Free University," which indicates it's not linked to e.g. the Catholic church. Just FYI.
Does this mean the death of Minix3? That would be a shame I'd like to have seen a good open-source microkernel OS - a sort of "open source OSX".
So...Dr. Tannenbaum's other project is Electoral-vote.com (2), an election prediction site (and one of the first). Any clue what's going to happen to that?
Finding God in a Dog
I own both "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" and "Distributed Operating Systems". When I saw the retirement announcement, I cracked them open for the first time in many years to recall how much I learned from them.
But my favorite of Tanenbaum's works is "Structured Computer Organization". I suppose it may be a bit dated, but I still recommend it to anyone who wants to know how computers work.
I'm sorry, but the best quote from that book is actually this one:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
In my networks class, we extended the calculation to a 747 full of DVDs (the best we could do at the time). Maybe one of these days, if I have a minute, I'll go back and do an A380 full of flash drives.
I ran Minix for a year or more on my Atari ST - having a UNIX-like operating system on a machine I could have at home was a truly awesome thing. Tanenbaum's work is fascinating, useful and will be around for a good while...which is more or less the definition of "successful" in academic circles.
The debates with Linus were interesting - but I always felt that they were arguing at cross-purposes. Linus wanted a quick implementation of something indistinguishable from "real UNIX" - Tanenbaum wanted something beautiful and elegant. Both got what they wanted - there was (and continues to be) no reason why they can't both continue to exist and be useful.
Tanenbaum's statement that the computer would mostly be running one program at a time was clearly unreasonable for a PC - but think about phones or embedded controllers like BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi? Perhaps Minix is a better solution in those kinds of applications?
www.sjbaker.org
I remember when Microsoft paid Ken Brown throug the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution to do a hatchet job on Linus claiming that Linux was stolen from MINIX. Now Tanenbaum, who has criticized the Linux kernel design and had some spirited exchanges with Linus, could have just said nothing and let Linus fend the FUD off by himself, but instead he stepped up and did the honorable thing by decimating Brown's arguments that Linus could have come up with the Linux kernel in just a year and his competency as a researcher/writer.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/rebuttal/
They have to use "Vrije" because it was discovered that not only is the name of "Free University Compiler Kit" obscene, but it's also misleading: the software is non-free.
In the early 80s, I did a Unix systems startup in the UK: we were an early licensee of Unix from AT&T and sold VAXen with BSD installed and supported. DEC UK hated us. DEC US happily sold us CPUs.
In April 1983, the European Unix User's Group (EUUG), held a conference in Bonn, Germany. The speakers included Bill Joy, Sam Leffler, Steve Bourne and Andy Tanenbaum.
It was a hugely memorable event, including Prof. Tanenbaum's presentation. We were paying AT&T $200 or so for each Unix license. Not a huge deal for a $100,000 VAX system. But, even then, many of us could see a future where Unix or something like it would run on countless devices, including cars and washing machines. In fact, when I worked for AT&T in 1984 (yes, I know, it was "a learning experience"), I was pitching exactly that to OEMs. It was clear that something cheap or free would be required. So, back in 1983, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Prof. Tanenbaum gave us all the seed of a thought that free (as in beer) software could change the world.
As an aside, his presentation was a little hard to follow, but worth the effort, because his English wasn't that great. A Dutch guy sitting next to me said that his Dutch was pretty sketchy, too. I have no means to verify this but, if true, he would join a small group of my friends and acquaintances who don't speak any (human) language well. They're all engineers :-).
I also learned that, despite Bonn being largely flooded because of heavy rains, nothing stops a Unix conference, and that the "Geoffnet" signs I saw all over the place weren't a promotion for a new network stack, but meant "Open" in German.
D'oh. Accidentally posted as a Coward and misspelled Prof. Tanenbaum's name. Carry on....
In the early 80s, I did a Unix systems startup in the UK: we were an early licensee of Unix from AT&T and sold VAXen with BSD installed and supported. DEC UK hated us. DEC US happily sold us CPUs.
In April 1983, the European Unix User's Group (EUUG), held a conference in Bonn, Germany. The speakers included Bill Joy, Sam Leffler, Steve Bourne and Andy Tanenbaum.
It was a hugely memorable event, including Prof. Tanenbaum's presentation. We were paying AT&T $200 or so for each Unix license. Not a huge deal for a $100,000 VAX system. But, even then, many of us could see a future where Unix or something like it would run on countless devices, including cars and washing machines. In fact, when I worked for AT&T in 1984 (yes, I know, it was "a learning experience"), I was pitching exactly that to OEMs. It was clear that something cheap or free would be required. So, back in 1983, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Prof. Tanenbaum gave us all the seed of a thought that free (as in beer) software could change the world.
As an aside, his presentation was a little hard to follow, but worth the effort, because his English wasn't that great. A Dutch guy sitting next to me said that his Dutch was pretty sketchy, too. I have no means to verify this but, if true, he would join a small group of my friends and acquaintances who don't speak any (human) language well. They're all engineers :-).
I also learned that, despite Bonn being largely flooded because of heavy rains, nothing stops a Unix conference, and that the "Geoffnet" signs I saw all over the place weren't a promotion for a new network stack, but meant "Open" in German.
Anyone else laugh themselves stupid at some of the predictions of the future in those posts? The idea that x86 would go away and GNU/Hurd would supplant Linux...
Predicting the future is REALLY hard.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Really, his books are quite good, I used his the operating systems book in my undergraduate classes. I honestly found reading his book more productive than going to the classes.
What's "difficult" is finding "a computer with a single mechanical hard disk drive" that stays that way for long. Desktops tend to have internal optical drives, laptops often have an internal SSD or internal or external optical drives, and both tend to often get small SSDs plugged into them.
Minix has been BSD licensed for well over a decade. I'm not sure exactly how long, but it was when I was an undergrad and that was a depressingly long time ago now. As the kids today say: Old troll is old.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not only does he use polling data to do a good job of predicting the races and the control of the US Senate/House (his track record here and a comparison of his model to Nate Silver), but he has, IMHO, excellent explanations of how the campaign managers are thinking and the likely impact of political news.
It is surprising to me that being located in Europe that he 1) cares and 2) is so wired into the US political scene. I hope he continues.
Interesting that he doesn't list Amoeba among his achievements. I find it far more impressive than Minix.