Andrew S. Tanenbaum, professor emeritus of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux.
Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000.
VU Amsterdam website
Definitely a deserved award for Tanenbaum, and it’s a minuscule bit of pride that VU Amsterdam happens to be my Alma mater. He also wrote an article for OSAlert way back in 2006, detailing MINIX 3, which is definitely a cool notch to have on our belt.
Well deserved!
We might not know it, but at one point MINIX was the most popular operating system in the world. No, I am not talking about their famous beef with Linux, but rather being included in all Intel CPUs (as part of the system management).
Hands up those who were taught with his book.
Even I, a mechanical engineer, own a copy