I recently had the opportunity to interview Andrew S. Tanenbaum, creator of the extremely secure Unix-like operating sytem MINIX 3. Andrew is also the author of Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the must-have book on programming and designing operating systems, and the man whose work inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux.

MINIX has traditionally been an operating system with an eye toward education. Both versions 1 and 2 of the MINIX system were designed to be useful for students learning about operating systems. The code behind MINIX was small and clean, making it a practical study tool in this complex field.

“A couple of years ago this guy called Ken Brown wrote a book saying that Linus stole Linux from me… It later came out that Microsoft had paid him to do this…”

–Andrew S Tanenbaum, father on MINIX

MINIX 3 is a free software operating system designed to be highly reliable, flexible, and secure. It is loosely based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways.

Linux (pronunced: /ˈlɪnʊks/, lin-uks) is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released.

Computer science veteran Andrew Tanenbaum presented the third version of his Minix operating system at the FOSDEM 2010 conference on February 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium.

Andrew Tanenbaum: «...A microkernel is much better engineered and is more modular and easier to understand. Monolithic kernels are still too big and unreliable. My metric is the TV set. The system should run for 10 years with a total of zero failures for 99.9% of the users...»

"Finally someone has seen the light and started a project that I called for in a previous article. This melding of the Minix kernel with the GNU userland is called Preventa..."

Linux Pro Magazine met the author of numerous standard works in informatics and the most famous Linux critic at the Fosdem in Brussels.