Andrew S Tanenbaum

MINIX was created to be a teaching tool for operating system design and was first released in 1987. Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 for the IBM PC, which was becoming popular at that time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and included a memory manager, file system, and core Unix utility programs. Its system call interface was compatible with Unix 7th Edition. Its source code was released in 1987 to accompany Tanenbaum's textbook "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation".

MINIX was a significant pedagogical milestone in operating systems. For the first time, it made widely available - to anyone who bought from a bookstore - a complete, working Unix-like system in source code form, and explained its full design, implementation, and operation in the most direct manner in the accompanying book.  It instructed generations of computer science students and many others on the topic of operating systems.  People all over the world started learning operating systems by studying the MINIX operating system, and many still do today.

In addition to its impact on the teaching of operating systems, MINIX has influenced day-to-day industrial practice, including inspiring the initial development of Linux, almost ubiquitous today in many systems, both large and small. Finally, MINIX and Tanenbaum have made significant contributions to the lively debate of monolithic vs microkernel structures in operating systems.