I’ll never forget this. I was listening to a talk by Reed Hastings (Netflix Founder/CEO) at (I think was) Stanford. He was explaining how he came up with the idea of Netflix. A student asked: “when did you realize you had to switch to the internet”. At which he replied: “that was the idea from the beginning. We knew networks were going to become what they are today. Look, there’s a saying in a CS textbook that says: ‘never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes over the interstate’. We knew we had to ship the DVDs first until at some point the network would reach our desired level”.

While I was watching that i said: “DUDE! I remember that quote (and that illustration)”. Went to my text book and there it was. In Tanenbaum’s networking textbook.

Aside from the anecdote, this guy has had a huge influence in the whole industry (not even mentioning the Kernel debates).

Well-deserved, congrats Andrew. I still have his distributed systems textbooks from way back when, and still wish Minix had won and its microkernel model had become the basis of the FOSS *nix ecosystem.

Also in case anyone is not aware, Andrew runs the election science blog Electoral Vote [1], using an electoral college poll model to analyze and predict US elections. One of the better US political sites out there.

[1]:https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Info/welcome.html

I was failing badly in my computer architecture courses. Received a 5% score in one of the mid-terms. Switched from the recommended book to Andrew's book and did nothing apart from read it everyday for 2 hours. Received 100% in the final. Such an amazingly approachable book. :-)

This is a richly deserved award for a great educator who makes computer science both accessible and enjoyable.

Structures computer organisation is supposed to be a textbook but it's written so well I found myself reading it cover to cover like a thriller.

You won't find many people saying that about Knuth for example (not to say anything against Knuth who is amazing in his own way).

I see ASTs books, in particular the hands-on Minix ones, as sitting on the same “plane” as the philosophy espoused in The Night Watch paper. Ultimately the paper is about a level of comfort with reality that is at it’s core rooted in familiarity with rather than ignorance due to abstractions, and having learned fearlessness rather than helplessness. While it is highly unlikely you will be having a debugging session that has you executing kernel-level code alongside having an oscilloscope/logic probe hooked up to the pins of a processor chip to monitor data lines (though we all know someone who does this without a second thought), having this level of knowledge and comfort with being ever so slightly closer to the silicone, the data sheet of the processor somewhere near by, the memory segmentation modes not too alien of a concept, is a great boon to a software developer. It is a leap that I think everyone should try just once, and with it, abolish any notion of mental barriers that prevent one from understanding how things really work.

Not to mention MINIX is hidden away in almost every modern Intel CPU as part of its Management Engine. This little known fact makes it one of the most widely distributed operating systems.

I read Operating Systems: Design and Implementation in 1988 or 1989, and it was an insightful and pleasing experience. I only wished, at the time, that there was some Unix-like OS that was "free" (for some intuitive value of the word "free", rather than the formal definition, which I hadn't heard of yet at the time). This could have been Minix.

His book “Computer Networks” was one of my favourites in my CompSci study days. Many years later I gave lectures on Distributed Systems at a business school and based the material on the book. Still feels relevant, even today.

It's kind of sad systems research pretty much stopped at this point. I really was hoping that by 2024 I'd be running a distributed operating system where processes could be be freely migrated between my phone, desktop, laptop and NAS without too much of a hitch.

Another awesome fact about Tanenbaum is that he was the person behind electoral-vote.com. Prior to everyone having their own model and Nate Silver (err, should I say Poblano?) running the table in 2008, this was the place to go understand the 2004 US Presidential Election between Bush and Kerry. Hugely helpful for many people to understand polling and statistics.

I have read Tanenbaum's book twice. Really great book. Very dense in information but enjoyable as well. That and the Common Lisp Reference Manual were at some point my favorite CS readings. I was reading them in printed form.

I want to appreciate Andrew Tanenbaum for making possible the world's most popular OS, Intel ME. This system has been made absolutely right in every its piece except license. Minix under GPL would not let megagorporations to backdoor every functional x86 chip on the planet.

The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is also his work (along with Ceriel Jacobs):

  https://github.com/davidgiven/ack

Just as Minix perhaps could've been Linux, The Amsterdam Compiler Kit could've been gcc, but for licensing issues:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/10/firstchapters....

Err, perhaps I'm missing something, but if the ACM Software System Award is presented to an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, how come Linus hasn't got his yet?

I came across Tanenbaum's Operating Systems book during my CS and it had a huge influence over me, till then I was a huge Windows nerd and after reading the book I felt like I was being cheated by Windows, like I was denied something which was rightfully mine.

I hated my labs as it had only Windows, started exploring *nix systems post class and never went back.

Thank you Mr.Andrew and congratulations.

It's funny to see how they highlight that it inspired Linux, ehile Tanenbaum heavily criticized it for not being a microkernel :D

Along with K&R (and K and Plauger’s “Software Tools”), the Dragon book, Bentley’s Programming Pearls, and Holzmann’s Beyond Photography, AST’s books were the most formative in my life (I started coding in 1976 but was self-taught until early 80s when I got to college and read all these brilliant works). Long overdue recognition; so many people benefited from the lucidity of these minds.

Man, his Computer Networks books were dense but they had a lot of good stuff in them. They also had really good and fun looking covers.

I was myself taught Computer Architecture in 1991 using the Tanenbaum SCO book, and many years later taught the Computer Architecture course for four years using the SCO book (a later edition, but still!). A true classic, and if anything, it is a wonder that Tanenbaum had not already received the award.

Every student should read Tanenbaum's "Structured Computer Organization". It was the first book which showed me the logical layering involved in a "Computer System" which is absolutely essential to understanding this field.

is MINIX abandonware now? Many years ago I tried to install the release that works (or comes bundled) with a light window manager but it was not trivial and it looked pretty abandoned even back then.

He wrote great books. I am ashamed to admit his OS book served as a monitor support on my desk for some time.

So what is the outcome of the kernel war? Performant micro-kernels have settled it no?

IIRC, Structured Computer Organization played the same role for me, back in the day, that I think From Nand to Tetris has for many of you all.

Still have a cd-rom with copy of minix3, from when he had a talk in my university. His books on OS and Networking are very approachable and fun read!

There is still a lot of research and innovation, but it doesn't always come in the way of completely new software projects. The cost of trying to build a new OS is simply massive. You need to be compatible with existing useful software if you want to do anything other than an appliance. Anything that provides a new paradigm shift that requires changing existing software has a huge slog ahead of it to make it successful. That said, there is tons of incremental progress in the operating systems.

I think a lot of folks have thought about the idea of a truly distributed operating system. I'm pretty sure existing operating systems will eventually evolve in that direction. You already see bits and pieces of it popping up.

Sounds like you like myself have taken Rob Pike’s take from long ago to heart http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

While plenty of things have happened since that paper, I have this sinking feeling that he was right and we just stopped trying to really expand and explore what’s possible. But it may be more a matter of the state of academia than about the domain itself. It’s not like people were getting a bunch of conference invitations for GPGPU applications with ML until hype freight trains hit. This sobering reality of academic hegemony and grant chasing kept me from ever getting terribly interested in systems research unfortunately.

The research has not stalled at all, the incentive to make consumer devices has because of the capture by tech giants. If someone wanted to implement an interesting idea like this, they would be harshly judged for not being able to compete with pixels and iphones for the rest of the stack. See Rabbit for example.

What you are describing is the bread and butter of modern systems research and all the large cloud providers internally implement this kind of thing.

You should be looking at infrastructure related roles for this stuff; live migrations of VMs and containers are regularly done when you drain a VM or Kubernetes minion, for example.

For consumers, they mostly care about the user experience. Having software that syncs their contents to a server thus making it available to all devices has much lower overhead than trying to live migrate a process over unreliable networks.

This type of thing always seemed to be in the very cool but pointless basket, to me.

A lot of systems researchers were absolutely obsessed with clustering, network transparency, distributed systems, and viewed them as the pinnacle of the operating system. I never understood why. I completely understand the coolness factor mind you, I just never could see why it was so important that your server-laptop-phone-network system behaved as a single system.

I think a lot of effort was wasted chasing that dragon. Wasted is probably the wrong word because research into cool things is good and probably created useful things along the way. I don't feel there was ever enough justification put into it and it could possibly have been better spent though.

The alternative of having multi-system tools and programming models that allow you to manage multiple systems without having them appear as a single image at the lowest level didn't get much love from academia after TCP/IP, and was largely developed by industry.

> running a distributed operating system where processes could be be freely migrated between my phone, desktop, laptop and NAS without too much of a hitch.

This was what i always wanted ever since i read Tanenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" and in particular his "Amoeba distributed OS" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_(operating_system) Also see Plan 9/Inferno from Bell Labs. But instead what we got (due to industry shenanigans) is this garbage/duct-tape of distribution gone crazy in the "Cloud".

>It's kind of sad systems research pretty much stopped at this point.

No, it has not.[0]

0. https://trustworthy.systems/publications/

If you really wanted to do this, it would be fairly trivial to implement with Erlang/Elixir. We have thr technology - just no motivation (i.e. no profit in it)

MINIX3's development has stalled years ago.

Basically, around MINIX 3.2.0 (just before I stated contributing) the OS ditched its homegrown userland and adopted the NetBSD source tree + pkgsrc. While that boosted the software compatibility of MINIX3 in the short term, the maintenance burden of keeping up with upstream with such a large diff proved unsustainable in the long term, especially after the grant money dried up.

In hindsight, my opinion is that MINIX3 should've gone with NetBSD binary compatibility. The NetBSD syscall table would've been a far slower moving target to keep up with than the entire NetBSD source tree.

The OS also had a significant amount of tech debt, especially in the microkernel which was uniprocessor and 32-bit only, as well as outdated hardware support which meant nobody was daily-driving it anymore. It also was an aging design: while the system was divided up into user-mode servers with message-based communication, you couldn't containerize a process by spawning a parallel userland ecosystem for example because it wasn't capability-based or namespaceable.

It's too bad really, because the base system had really impressive capabilities. It could transparently survive crashes of stateless drivers, even when stress-testing it by injecting faults into the drivers at runtime. You could live-update the various system services at runtime without losing state or impacting clients. Some really good papers came out of MINIX3 [1].

I've ranted more in detail before, both on HN [2] as well on Google Groups [3]. I do not fault the maintainers for the current state of affairs because keeping up the MINIX3 userland against modern software standards was a major maintenance burden, so adopting NetBSD's one way or another was inevitable. At any rate, there are other micro-kernel based operating systems [4], some under active development, so MINIX's spirit lives on.

[1] https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=publications

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916261

[3] https://groups.google.com/g/minix3/c/qUdPZ0ansVw/m/7LuOv0YOA...

[4] http://www.microkernel.info/

Not even a commit in years. Yes, I would say it is dead.