Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a debate between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding the Linux kernel and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.minix, arguing that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels and therefore Linux was, even in 1992, obsolete. Linux kernel developers Peter MacDonald, David S. Miller and Theodore Ts'o also joined the debate. The debate has sometimes been considered a flame war. While the debate initially started out as relatively moderate, with both parties involved making only banal statements about kernel design, it grew progressively more
EPOC (operating system) system to drive their next generation of devices. First, however, they needed to engineer a 16-bit single-board computer—something that was extremely difficult at the time. They codenamed the project "SIBO", for "single-board organiser" or "sixteen-bit organiser". To develop the SIBO hardware and software, they needed samples of the 16-bit microprocessors they would be programming; but it took more than a year to secure the chips, which caused a significant delay. By 1987, development of EPOC was underway: It was a single-user, preemptive multitasking operating system designed to run in read-only memory (ROM). The operating system and its programmes were written