[TUHS] Some UNIX/TS Info From John Mashey

[Andy Kosela via TUHS]

On Sat, May 9, 2026 at 3:30 AM Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Sat, May 09, 2026 at 11:07:30AM +1000, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> > On Fri, May 08, 2026 at 10:46:30AM -0700, Larry McVoy via TUHS wrote:
> > > Huh, I just learned that Andrew was part of Masscomp.  Clem, how did
> that
> > > come about?
> >
> > The Andrew Tannenbaum (trb) who worked at Masscomp and ISC is not
> > the Andrew Tanenbaum (ast) associated with MINIX.
>
> But it was the Masscomp guy who did the history writeup?  I could see that
> with Clem at Masscomp, Clem knows the history.
>
> Thanks for the clarification Jonathan, appreciate it.
>
> In the information you didn't ask for department, I'm half Dutch,
> have lived there, learned the language, some, and I interviewed with
> ast to go to grad school there (I think, it was a long time ago, when I
> went there is not clear but I did interview with him).  I really liked
> the Minix idea, it wasn't as good as QNX but it was mostly (I think)
> just him.  It's a significant chunk of work.  I decided to pass because
> the building he was in was gray, the furniture was gray, the weather
> was gray.  That's trite but where he was working just didn't suck me in.
> While I don't regret that choice, I think working with him could have
> been fun.


While MINIX 1 and 2 were mostly AST’s work and aimed at education, MINIX 3
was a different beast. It was intended to be production-grade and developed
as a collaborative effort. I know this because I contributed some code to
it. It also leveraged the NetBSD userland.

That included:

- NetBSD libc
- NetBSD build infrastructure
- many NetBSD userland utilities: ls, cp, sh, etc.
- NetBSD bootloader components
- pkgsrc package system

In practice, later MINIX 3 felt closer to a small NetBSD-like system
running on top of the MINIX microkernel than to the older, fully
self-contained MINIX 1/2 systems. It was really nice and I am still amazed
why it did not become more popular.

--Andy