History of MINIX 3

MINIX has a long history. It goes back to 1987 when the first edition of the book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum was published. The first version of MINIX was intended for teaching and it became very popular very quickly. One of the early users was a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, who learned all about operating systems from reading the book and modifying the system. Eventually he went on to write his own operating system, Linux. In 2004, a man named Ken Brown accused Torvalds of copying MINIX verbatim, but that was quickly refuted in a statement published 20 May 2004 by Andrew Tanenbaum. A second edition of MINIX (and a second edition of the book, coauthored by Albert S. Woodhull) was released in 1997. This version was greatly improved from the first version but was still aimed at teaching operating systems to a large extent. It was only with the third version, MINIX 3, and the third version of the book, published in 2006, that the emphasis changed from teaching to a serious research and production system, especially for embedded systems. A few of the many differences between MINIX 2 and MINIX 3 are given here. Going forward, we are making a serious effort to turn MINIX 3 in an industrial-grade system with a focus on the embedded market, especially for those applications that need high reliability and availability.