7 Jun 2026
0:00 The most used OS you never installed
0:38 Born from spite. The AT&T Unix license ban
1:25 Tanenbaum rewrites an OS from scratch
2:34 Kept too small. Enter Linus Torvalds
3:06 It was never meant to be called Linux
3:44 The umbilical cord. Linux on the Minix filesystem
4:26 The fork that decides everything. BSD vs GPL
5:01 Linux eats the world
5:24 Minix 3 and the reincarnation server
6:26 Ring minus 3. The hidden computer inside Intel
7:15 The answer is Minix
8:32 The open letter. As a courtesy
9:17 Why the license was everything
10:58 What we take home
The most widely deployed operating system on x86 machines is not Windows. It is not Linux. It is Minix. A teaching OS written by Andrew Tanenbaum to get around a license now runs in secret at the deepest privilege level of roughly a billion Intel chips. And its creator found out from the news.
This is the story of an OS born to rebel against a license, and walled inside a black box twenty years later by a license. BSD versus GPL, and why the right license matters more than the best code.
Tanenbaum’s open letter to Intel (the “as a courtesy” letter, original):
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
Tom’s Hardware on the letter and that he learned it from press coverage:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/min…
Tom’s Hardware on Google removing the Minix-based ME (Minnich):
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/goo…
Ronald Minnich’s ELC Europe 2017 talk “Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux” writeup (CNX Software):
https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/11/…
BleepingComputer, ME runs Minix, Ring minus 3, web server, file system:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news…
Minix on Wikipedia (1987, microkernel, BSD license, ME among supported platforms): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix
Minix 3 on Wikipedia (2005 release, reincarnation server, self-healing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix_3
The Freax name and Ari Lemmke renaming it on the FTP server:
https://www.linux.org/threads/how-sho…
[…]
17 May 2026
After the Second World War, Britain rapidly de-industrialised. For places like Manchester where industry and manufacturing was its economic and social bread and butter, the challenge was to adapt quickly to a rapidly changing world. the city centre was slowly reshaped. Out went mills, warehouses and canals. In came office blocks, shiny glass towers, new architectural fashions, and shopping centres.
Manchester had spent a century and a half influencing the outside world. Now it would have to cope with being influenced by it!
[…]
msamba 