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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, May 20, 2004

Some Notes on the 'Who wrote Linux' Kerfuffle, Release 1.3

Minix author Andy Tanenbaum chimes in on the "who wrote Linux" debate. "There are worse people to ask ... about the history of UNIX. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group at Bell Labs. I knew Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger, among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam ... although I had nothing to do with the development of the original UNIX, I knew all the people involved and much of the history quite well ... Years later, I was teaching a course on operating systems and using John Lions' book on UNIX Version 6. When AT&T decided to forbid the teaching of the UNIX internals, I decided to write my own version of UNIX, free of all AT&T code and restrictions, so I could teach from it ... I set out to write a minimal UNIX clone, MINIX, and did it alone. The code was 100% free of AT&T's intellectual property."

Very interesting, and required reading for anyone that's into Linux.

[ Posted at 4:13 PM | Permalink ]