Re: ADTI

[Corey Gilmore <cfg () dln uvm edu>]

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 halvar () gmx de wrote:

> While I am ranting about this sort of bull****, I'd like
> to ask people on this list who have dabbled in OS development wether
> they would subscribe the the idea that ADTI is putting out in this article
>
> http://www.adti.net/samizdat/brown.reply.june.04.html
>
> namely, that it is impossible for a 21 year old student with one year of
> C experience to write the linux kernel (as it was in the first releases of
> linux).
>
> Personally, I think it is not only possible for a 21 year old student to write
> a small OS kernel (equivalent to what the linux kernel was originally), I think
> it doesn't even take a particularly bright student to do it (beware: I am not
> implying that Linus isn't bright). There is more than one example of 15 and
> 16 year olds hacking up really good pmode extenders (even with limited 
> virtual memory support) while teaching themselves C. Any veterans of 
> Wrox Pres "Master Class Assembly Language" will remember that it contained
> a step-by-step walkthrough on how to build a DPMI extender. From a DPMI 
> extender it is not a huge step to something similar to a mini OS.

Tanenbaum agrees with you, no matter how Brown tries to spin the
interview he conducted.  Read Tanenbaum's rebuttal to Brown at
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/rebuttal/

To jump to the end of his reubttal, 

"All in all, Brown's only argument is that he, personally, doesn't believe
a 21-year-old kid could have written an operating system kernel in a year,
despite the fact that half a dozen other people had done the same thing
earlier and the code Linus wrote wasn't all that great initially. And
faced with a whole bunch of people telling him otherwise and the
consultant he hired to examine the code saying the code is completely
different from MINIX, Brown just ignores all the facts and persists in his
belief. I'll bet he dismisses the widely reported claim that Mozart wrote
three symphonies and performed for the King of England when he was nine on
the grounds that 9-year-olds don't normally do this sort of thing."

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