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From: owens@acsu.buffalo.edu (bill owens)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Where is MINIX going?
Keywords: MINIX
Message-ID: <48820@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 3 Dec 90 15:27:41 GMT
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 ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>I regard MINIX as the competitor and possibly successor to
>XINU.  It is aimed at the same audience as XINU.  To me, success or failure is
>measured in some sense in how well it does compared to XINU.

If we let history be the judge, the 266 articles which have arrived here 
from comp.os.xinu compare poorly against the 13532 articles for 
comp.os.minix. I've yet to hear of any use of xinu beyond the purely
academic; my inquiries about it were met with immediate, gracious 
responses from Dr. Comer, but his information only showed it to be
a non-contender.

And to make the point that Minix is still a viable teaching system,
my instructor for OS class next semester was only willing to consider
it after he found out what it actually contained; he was afraid it
wouldn't have enough of the features of a 'real-world' OS. His viewpoint
was that a 'toy' system would make it harder to teach some of the
most important parts of practical OS work, since it wouldn't include
them. We'll still have to study VM and some other esoteric things
without real examples in code (except for BSD :), but the class as 
a whole will be taught using Minix 1.5.10.

Bill.