Linux Was Obsolete 30 Years Ago

Nowadays it's well established that Linux is the king of the free software world but that doesn't mean when it was first created it was following "optimal" operating system design principles, in fact the creator of Minix would have failed Linus Torvalds out of his OS class.

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[BrodieRobertson]

I was unaware of the use of MINIX in Intel ME, congrats to Andy for his project being embedded in such an obscure companies CPU

[LaughingOrange]

"Where is Minix today?", possibly running in Intel ME which runs on every modern Intel CPU, though nobody can confirm or deny this.

[juzujuzu]

Aah, the memories. Being young teenager in Finland (country that has only 5 million people) and constantly hearing rumors about some Finnish dude who has made his own operating system. Then finally playing with Linux in Assembly 1994 demoparty in Helsinki where Linux people had their own booth. I would so want to know if Linus was there, but I remember playing with the OS and laughing (it was the time of Amiga vs. PC war and I was in the Amiga camp) and then some dude who looked a lot like Linus got angry and threw us out from the booth.

Safe to say I was a little bit wrong about the future prospects of that project. Though in my defense demoscene was cool, but the Linux people were the stereotypical 80s nerds. Those were the times when future seemed great and not technocratic dystopia.

[bit-tuber]

"If it works, it's obsolete". A well loved quote from the electronics world of way back when that I regularly apply to the worlds of software designs.

[bitskit]

It's unfortunate that people confuse completed software with obsoleted software. We're forever doomed to the experience of abandonware, bloatware, feature breaking deprecation, and increasing user exploitation.

[bertnijhof]

In the 2nd part of the seventies, I designed a mini kernel OS, that was used in our Air Traffic Control systems till 1990. It was a mini kernel part with a minimal set of routines written in assembler with a pre-emptive task scheduler, basic IO, semaphores, interrupt handling, etc (~20 assembler routines of max 2 pages each :) On top of that written in RTL/2 (like C); device handlers; messaging; name translation for semaphores; processor/task names. It had to run in 16-bits minis, so the majority of the inter-task communication was based on messaging. The message address had 2 bytes processor-id, task-id.

The OS had tasks written in RTL/2, that took care of; networking (during that time HDLC); file management; booting PCs; crash dumps; operator communication; debugging; hardware error logging and software error logging. All used messaging and could thus be used over the network. Minis on the radar head were booted over telephone line and so were the radar display minis. The RTL/2 part of the OS kernel had its own page table and each OS task could run in an own page table. The applications were organized in task-groups (processes) with N tasks (threads) sharing a page table. All IO was done by a small task, that e, g would read from the radar and send it to the tracking application or a large task to receive the tracks from the multi-radar tracker and display it on the 25" circular graphical display, all green or the very advanced ones in 4 colors red, orange, greenish yellow and yellowish green :)

A typical system of us would have say 1 to 5 radars with 2 mini computers (master/slave) per radar with say 5 to 40 graphical radar displays controlled buy a mini computer. The central part would be a master/slave configuration for multi radar tracking and another set for flight-plan processing. In more advanced system we had 2 processors for Status Control and Monitoring. Often was a third set available, but powered off or used for testing.

The OS design was based on the theories of;
1. semaphores and layering an OS from Dijkstra and
2. information hiding from Parnas (the first essential step to OO).
All program code was in read-only pages and r/w data was initialized dynamically in the r/w pages. All job control was done during the system generation (off line), stuff related to name translation; page tables; task groups; (their tasks, app data-areas; message areas; stack sizes and init parameters). The end result was one image per type of processor. The system was completely memory based. No virtual memory no program overlays, there was no times for it, we had to process say up to ~250 aircraft per 5 seconds and each radar return required a lot sorting out and mathematics.

Now with the new snap based immutable Ubuntu Core 22.04, you see those theories being used more and more, since some of those OS functions will use messaging and can be easily moved to snaps. On the first boot I see ~10 OS snaps being initialized. They also trying to minimize the size of the Ubuntu kernel, that I think runs in a lxc container.

[CasperLabuschagne]

In 1991 when Linus made his initial announcement, there was a common phrase (that thankfully fell into disuse) called vapourware that referred to operating systems and new office suites that were announced many years before it could actually be compiled let alone run and even more years before serious bugs were finally eliminated. A large part of the success of Linux was that right from the start it existed and has never suffered from the vaporware blight. This was critical for the emergent Internet in the early 1990's where one could simply install Slackware and get on the Internet and world wide web albeit with Lynx, Pan, Veronica, Gopher and Archie. To provide some perspective, in 1991 we were hardly using WIndows 3 yet, Windows 95 was four years away while Windows NT which was eagerly expected by 1991 was released in July 1993. When Windows 95 was launched in 1995, Linux had version 1.0 of the Apache web server which was argueably the most critical part in the success of Linux..

[billeterk]

I still hav Tannenbaum’s 90s textbook from Comp Sci. I used to sing ‘O Tannenbaum’ when taking it out of my bag :-)

[mskiptr]

17:25 Today minix is in your firmware, controlling your computer from the shadows.

[volodymyrkilchenko]

it's always interesting to see how people of the past watched into the future

[rayanmazouz]

microkernels aren't a meme, they're still seen as the kernels of the future even today, they're just *much* harder to program well

[scottfranco]

"the braindead nature of the x86 CPUs makes that difficult to do otherwise" THANK YOU. I have had endless debates with people who claim that including drivers in the kernel is the only way to go. In fact, Intel designed the x86 memory model to support three rings, from 0 to 3, with the drivers living outside the kernel. The problem is (as usual for Intel) they botched it. They tried to build tasking into the hardware, and the result was a bug ridden low performance mess that nobody uses. In fact, if you go back and read how Multics was designed, you will realize that Intel copied Multics design into their 80286 processors (yes, that Multics, the overcomplex system that Unix was created as a rebellion against). I explain the origin of 80286 protection model as being like the episode of Startrek where they go to a planet that is structured on the gangs of old Chicago because some previous visiting ship messed up and left a book on Chicago history behind, and they based their whole civilization on it. If you read up on the x86 protection/memory model, which all stems from the 80286, you realize that the designers read a book on Multics and that was it. They imitated the design. As one German Zeppelin engineer stated when getting a look at the R-101, which crashed and burned in France killing almost all abord: "you have imitated our design completely, including our mistakes".

PS. before you mark me as an Intel basher, I am an ex-Intel employee.

[paladingeorge]

In my opinion, code is only obsolete if its horribly insecure such that a normal user wouldn't be safe to use it.

[BaronCAD]

Obsolete is simply not an argument for choice of software. I run a sendmail server that first went online in 1997. It (sendmail) is rock solid and fabulous, and I never worry about who might be reading my mail.

[sirgermaine]

The company I work at (thousands of developers) is just starting to finally have customers migrate the core user-facing client from a Visual Basic app to something web-based. Microsoft apparently said (probably now a decade ago) they never expected anyone would extend VB this far. Obsolete only matters if you can't get what you need done with the tools you have.

[MonochromeWench]

Hybrid Kernel Windows NT would quickly demonstrate what not to do and at times it seems like the NT devs have been fighting at their own design moving bits in and out of kernel space in the stability vs performance battle.

[lavavex]

I want a separate video for every Linus flame war

[santonopoulou]

Great video as always Brodie. Learning a lot in this one honestly. Thanks for posting (obvs still watching but wanted to add a comment for the all holy algorithm ;) ).

[tankermottind]

Being "the best" in some theoretical technical sense has always been nothing compared to having a product out there that actually solves people's problems. Case in point: the IBM PC/x8i6 platform. It was never the most elegant, the fastest, nor the most sophisticated computer out there, but it was good enough, it had widespread support, and it was easy for clone for much cheaper than any name-brand 16/32-bit computer. People do not want "the best computer", people want the computer that meets their needs, and the clone makers did it better than Commodore, Apple, Acorn, and even IBM themselves. Minix and Hurd might in some technical sense be "more advanced" but Linux actually showed up with a working system and showed up first, while Hurd has been five years away from prime-time since I was in diapers, and Minix has never even seriously tried to be a viable general-purpose OS. If there was ever an OS that threatened to eclipse Linux as "the" FOSS operating system, it was 386/FreeBSD, which was even more archaic, with a history going straight back into AT&T Unix in the '70s! And it might have indeed been better than Linux since it was much more tightly integrated, but SCO's ratfucking ensured it was not there at the right time to solve people's problem (how do we free the PC clone platform from dependency on Microsoft), and Linux was. Hence Linux is everywhere and BSD is an also-ran.

Ninety percent of life, as they say, is just showing up. Linux showed up, and the pie-in-the-sky dreams of hyper-advanced operating systems from Plan 9 to OS/2 to Minix to Hurd to BeOS--didn't. Hell, you could say that in many ways the Apple ARM platform is technically superior to the x86 PC, but since it's enslaved to Apple's strategy of selling computers as a luxury brand, it will never threaten the PC's dominance. Luxury computers don't solve people's problems, workhorse commodity computers do, even if they're slower and less energy-efficient.

See also: Motorola 680x0. It was in many ways better than the x86 (at least until the Pentium II turned the x86 into a workstation-grade RISC beast that could be had for consumer-grade prices), but it didn't matter because the computers the x86 shipped in solved more problems.

[markuslanggeng]

I love these kinds of videos where you share the history & lore of linux and the softwares around it. It's my favourite story time!