What (who) is MINIX - definition

UNIX-LIKE OPERATING SYSTEM

MINIX; Minux; MINIX 2.0; Minix 1.0; Minix 2.0; MINIX 1.0

MINIX

<operating system> /MIN-ix/ A small operating system that is very similar to UNIX. MINIX was written for educational purposes by Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum of {Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam}. MINIX has been written from scratch and contains no AT&T code -- neither in the kernel, the compiler, the utilities, nor the libraries. Although copyrighted by Prentice-Hall, all sources, binaries and documentation can be obtained via Internet for educational or research purposes. Current versions as of 1996-11-15: MINIX 2.0 - Intel CPUs from Intel 8088 to Pentium MINIX 1.5 - Intel, Macintosh (MacMinix), Amiga, {Atari ST}, Sun SPARC. http://cs.vu.nl/MINIXast/minix.html. (1997-06-16)

Wikipedia

Minix

MINIX (from mini-Unix) is a Unix-like operating system based on a microkernel architecture. Since version 2.0, it has been Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant.

Early versions of MINIX were created by Andrew S. Tanenbaum for educational purposes. Starting with MINIX 3, the primary aim of development shifted from education to the creation of a highly reliable and self-healing microkernel OS. MINIX 3 was developed as open-source software.

MINIX was first released in 1987, with its complete source code made available to universities for study in courses and research. It has been free and open-source software since it was relicensed under the BSD-3-Clause license in April 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix

Examples of use of MINIX

1. It had been dubbed Linux (after Linus‘s Minix, as it was based on the Minix operating system, itself a spin–off from the Unix OS that sought to provide a stable UNIX platform for PCs). By the latter half of 1''4, Linux had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and – even better – it was absolutely free.