Tanenbaum reminds me of those "smart people" Art Williams was talking about in his 1987 "Just Do It" speech. Good to learn of another example of "more smart" not being "more successful".
> Tanenbaum reminds me of those "smart people" Art Williams was talking about in his 1987 "Just Do It" speech. Good to learn of another example of "more smart" not being "more successful".
There is essentially no definition of "unsuccessful" that applies to Andrew Tanenbaum's career. He spent the last few decades doing the sorts of things you'd expect a CS professor to do, and he did them really well. He conducted research projects, graduated PhDs, and the CS textbooks he authored are almost all extremely good.
MINIX was an educational demo. He slapped on a restrictive license even though he didn't make money from it, because his ego didn't want other people to touch his baby. Then he never made time to build anything useful with it. Being right about something you aren't going to build is worse than being a little wrong about something you build.
> Its use in the Intel ME makes it the most widely used OS on Intel processors starting as of 2015, with more installations than Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, or macOS.
