Minix is one of a number of " Unix-like" operating systems that includes Idris, Coherent and Uniflex . Some of these were written because AT&Ts initial licensing of Unix precluded it being sold to organisations for commercial use. The "Unix-like" OSs were written from scratch without any AT&T code. 1 History
Minix was written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands as an example in the textbook Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, BooksEnthsiast.com. An abridged 12,000 lines of source code of the kernel, memory manager, and file system is printed in the book; it is mostly written in C.
Minix was designed to run on IBM PC and IBM PC/AT computers in the late 1980s and early 1990sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s 2040s Years: Events and trends Computers, technology Explosive growth of the Internet; decrease in the cost of computers and other techn. Version 1.5 was also ported to run on Motorola 68000The Motorola 68000 is a CISC microprocessor, the first member of a successful family of microprocessors from Motorola, which were all mostly software compatible. The entire series was often referred to as the m68k or simply 68k History Originally, the MC6 based machines (such as the Atari STThe Atari ST was a home/ personal computer system released by Atari in 1985. The "ST" allegedly stood for "Sixteen/Thirty-two" which referred to the Motorola 68000's 32-bit internals with 16-bit external buses. Other theories say that ST really stood for, AmigaAmiga ( Spanish, "female friend") is the name of a range of home/ personal computers whose development started in 1982. The original Amiga Inc. company was bought out in 1984 by Commodore, who marketed the Amiga as their intended successor to the Commodor, and early Apple MacintoshMacintosh now known simply as Mac in all official capacities, is a family of personal computers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. of Cupertino, California, USA. Named after the McIntosh, a type of apple favoured by Jef Raskin, the Macintosh was launche) and SPARCSPARC S calable P rocessor ARC hitecture) is a RISC microprocessor architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc. an organisation established in 1989 to promote the SPARC and to p based machines (such as Sun WorkstationsSun Microsystems is a Silicon Valley-based computer, semiconductor and software manufacturer. Sun's products include computer servers and workstations based on the SPARC processor, the SunOS and Solaris operating systems, the NFS network file system, the). Version 2.0 is only available for the x86x86 or Intel 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. The architecture is called x86 because Intel used to give the earliest processors in this family numeric brand names ending in the sequence architecture.
Linux was influenced by Minix ( Linus Torvalds was familiar with it and used it as a development tool), but departs in many ways from the Minix architecture, especially its use of a monolithic kernel instead of a microkernel. At the time of its development, the license for Minix was considered very liberal, with a licensing fee that was very small in comparison to other similar operating systems. This was a compromise between Tanenbaum's intention for it to be an instructive example, and his publisher's desire to enforce its copyright in the code. Because it was not fully open source, volunteer development effort instead went into Linux and the FreeBSD kernels. In the late 1990s, the license for Minix was converted to open source, but by this time other operating systems had surpassed its capabilities, and it remained an educational tool - as Tanenbaum had expected - rather than becoming a widely-used operating system.
