I found this post the other day, and thought it was interesting.
Date: 13 Apr 91 18:17:44 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki Lines: 18 I've recently ported bash to minix-386 (nice, but takes about 300kB of RAM). It's been "tested" by me using it all the time (good editing and history - couldn't live without it any more), but I won't make any guarantees. If anybody is interested in cdiffs against bash-1.05, please mail me (I'll post if there is enough interest). The port definitely needs GCC, and 386-minix. ST-minix will probably work as well (I've sent it to one ST-minixer), after changeing a #define LITTLE_ENDIAN to BIG_ENDIAN. If the port already has been done by someone else - just ignore this message. Linus Torvalds [email protected] PS. I've hacked the kernel to accept gcc-compiled programs directly without going through gcc2minix, but I haven't tested it very much yet (bash works though, so most things probably will). Changes are trivial, mail me if interested. (And yes - it accepts old minix format too - you don't have to recompile everything :-)
Naturally it’s about the impending birth of Linux. First he needed to get GCC running under Minix 386, but I didn’t know at the time that he had patches floating around to allow Minix to directly run the GCC A.OUT format executables.
Scary to think that if Minix had allowed submissions and ‘bloat’ that Linux would have never been.
On the other hand, much like 386BSD the backpressure of having some kind of free BSD/UNIX system which did take in submissions was overwhelming, with the false start of 386BSD going the route of Minix and in that first critical year not pulling in any of the additional patches, while Linux grew by leaps and bounds. By the time the AT&T vs BSDi lawsuit hit, well the game was already in Linux’s favour, even with it’s already fragmented distro base.
