Linux It is a Unix-like operating system made up of free and open source software. It was born from the contributions of Richard Stallman in 1983 and Linus Torvalds in 1991. But in 1992, a computer genius declared: “Linux is obsolete.” It was Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a physicist at MIT and an astrophysicist at Berkeley.
He did it through an article he published in the discussion group comp.os.minix from Usenet.
Tanenbaum was the creator of Minix, a clone of the Unix operating system developed in 1987 from the microkernel.
Tanenbaum’s point was that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels, such as those used by Linux, and that by 1992 the operating system was obsolete.
Computer experts like David S. Miller and Theodore Ts’o joined the debate.
Torvalds responded on the forum saying that Linux was based on Minix and therefore Unix.
The arguments of Tanenbaum and Torvalds on Linux: what is the present of the operating system?
Tanenbaum, as recounted Juan Carlos López in Xataka, considered that the Linux kernel was not monolithic, that micronuclei are superior for their greater portability (the ability to adapt to a different architecture than the CPU they were designed for).
While Torvalds argued that although Linux’s monolithic design might make it less adaptable to other architectures than Minix, its application programming interface made up for that disadvantage.
By 2006, Tanenbaum revived the idea, with a story in Computer Magazine about the security and reliability of operating systems.
Although each one defended his point, neither did it with the intention of destroying the other, but simply to exchange ideas, making it one of the most brilliant examples of debate in the history of computing. Linux, despite Tanenbaum’s prediction, is in good health three decades later.