I hear Linus Torvalds in the media constantly for his accomplishments and contributions to the Linux kernel that he started working on. My question is "What about Andrew Tanenbaum?" I never hear his name mentioned, ever. I don't mean to undermine Mr. Torvald's hard work, but didn't Mr. Torvalds get much of his innovation and ideas from the Minix operating system? Shouldn't some people praise Andrew Tanenbaum for developing a Unix-like kernel that compiles flawlessly on almost all systems in less than 28,000 lines of code.

Hi Chris,

Yes, Tanenbaum and Minix played a very important role...but frankly, when you start trying to give credit, you really have to give credit to all of the developers, both at Bell Labs and around the world, who contributed to the original UNIX, not to mention Richard Stallman and his vision of a completely free version of UNIX. After all, the kernel is only one small part of the complete system. Linus couldn't have done what he did without the fundamental architecture laid down by Ken Thompson, the ideas of small cooperating programs developed by Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, and others, or the explosion of collaborative development that made UNIX such a rich programming environment. Not to mention the huge contributions of the folks at UC Berkeley, from Bill Joy through Kirk McKusick and Keith Bostic; and contributions like Larry Wall's patch, or the many people who built UUCP and Usenet, without which the culture of shared code development might never have taken off as it did.

There's a huge history here, which one day will be chronicled, and will no doubt provide grounds for debate, praise, and controversy among historians for many years to come.

I remember when Katie Hafner was writing her history of the early days of the Internet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late. She remarked to me that everyone had a different story about how it all started. My reply: they are likely all true. After all, ideas grow, one on the other, as in a conversation. We are all indebted to each other. That's why Open Source is such a powerful concept: it institutionalizes the sharing of ideas, and makes it a deliberate goal.

--Tim