[TUHS] Some UNIX/TS Info From John Mashey

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

BTW: for people newish to the Unix community, as noted there are two people
in our community named Andy Tannenbaum. They are both wonderful people, and
have enjoyed knowing them both. And for those of us that have known them,
they are sometimes referred to as “landscape” and “portrait” - I’ll leave
it to the reader to find pictures of each and to figure out which us which.
😉


Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

On Sat, May 9, 2026 at 8:31 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Yes, he was an early Masscomp hacker. How did that happen?  Easy, trb was
> a friend of mine from a few years previously. I had joined Masscomp as the
> second Unix hacker to help Tom with the O very early on. But shortly
> there after we started expanding as there was a lot to do, and I
> introduced trb to our VP of Eng (Lorin Gale) and Lorin hired him. IIRC: He
> worked extensively on the command system, for maybe two or three years.
>
> As I recall he was living closer to Boston proper and had a social life
> centered around Cambridge.  While Masscomp was out on 495
> (Littleton/Westford), so he had a bit if a haul. Eventually he took a job
> closer Cambridge. At some point he landed in the Boston office of
> Interactive Systems Corp, which is when he wrote that note, but I don’t
> remember if he had a stop somewhere else before that. I’ll have to ask him.
>
>
> Clem
>
>
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>
> On Sat, May 9, 2026 at 1:54 AM Andy Kosela via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>