Tanenbaum vs Torvalds: the War of Kernels and the Birth of Pragmatic Chaos
The Day the Flame Was Lit
January 1992. Somewhere in the primordial swamp of Usenet, in a corner called comp.os.minix, Professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum, father of MINIX and patron saint of academic order, drops a bomb: “Linux is obsolete.”
That sentence, typed in plain ASCII and pure arrogance, lands squarely on the screen of a 22-year-old Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. His reply is calm, sarcastic, and surgical. Thus begins one of the first great Internet flame wars, and accidentally, a philosophical debate that would shape decades of computer design: microkernel versus monolithic kernel, Platonic order versus evolutionary mess.
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