Minix

Minix was a commercial stripped-down version of UNIX that ran on IBM PC and IBM PC/AT[?] computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later versions ran on Motorola 68000 based machines (such as the Atari ST and early Apple Macintosh) and SPARC based machines (such as Sun Workstations).

Linux was influenced by Minix. At the time of its development, the license for Minix was considered very liberal, with licensing fee that was very small in comparison to other competing operating systems. However, because it was not fully open source, development effort went into Linux and the FreeBSD kernels. In the late 1990s, the license for Minix was converted to open source, but by this time it had only a small developer and user base.

Minix was written by Andrew Tanenbaum from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands as an appendix or example in the book "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation", ISBN 0-13-637331-3. The whole 12000 lines of source code of the kernel, memory manager, and file system is printed in the book; it is mostly written in C.

Minix distributions have the following ISBN numbers. They all contain all the source:

• A set of disks for IBM PC with 640K RAM, which can be used with 512K computers if you adjust some program sizes. Available as ISBN 0-13-583873-8.
• A set of disks for IBM PC with 256K RAM, which does not include the C compiler since it is not runnable. Available as ISBN 0-13-583881-9.
• A set of disks for IBM PC/AT with at least 512K RAM; 1.2M diskettes are used instead of 360K diskettes. Available as ISBN 0-13-583865-7.
• Nine-track, industry standard 1600 bpi magnetic tape in UNIX tar format. Includes an IBM PC simulator and some libraries and programs that make it possible to run the MINIX file system on a VAX or other minicomputer running UNIX. Available as ISBN 0-13-583899-1.

Links

• Minix Information Sheet (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix)
• Minix1.hampshire.edu (http://minix1.hampshire.edu/)
• Category at ODP (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Unix/MINIX/)

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There is also a file system called Minix. This is the default file system type used when installing Minix. It is also used by some Linux distributions as the format for bootable disks or other situations where a low-overhead filesystem is needed.