Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Writing a portable OS is not much harder than a nonportable one, and all systems should be written with portability in mind these days.

I really am not angry with Linus. Honest. He's not angry with me either.

'Linux is a leprosy' - This statement is not grammatically or factually correct.

But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a modern "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that.

A couple of years ago this guy called Ken Brown wrote a book saying that Linus stole Linux from me It later came out that Microsoft had paid him to do this

Microkernels are not a pipe dream. They represent proven technology.

I can type faster than I can point. And my mother told me that pointing is impolite.

I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year.

UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate.

The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small.

The only real argument for monolithic systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that microkernel systems can be just as fast as monolithic systems.

While most people can talk rationally about kernel design and portability, the issue of free-ness is 100% emotional.

If anyone had realized that within 10 years this tiny system that was picked up almost by accident was going to be controlling 50 million computers, considerably more thought might have gone into it.

I have a mouse, but don't have a mouse driver for MINIX and have never felt the need to write one. Typing "rm x y z" is a lot faster than clicking five times and then having to convince the system that you really, truly, mean it and this is not a mistake and that you are consenting adult over 18 and that you completely understand the consequences and you still want to do it.

Unfortunately, the current generation of mail programs do not have checkers to see if the sender knows what he is talking about.

A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring.

XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files

However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process.

With current technology it is possible to put four floppy disk drives in a personal computer. It is just that doing so would be pointless.

Sequential programming is really hard, and parallel programming is a step beyond that.

A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack.