Linus’s “just a hobby” post got no replies for 20 years. Then, starting in 2011, 78 people wrote back.

Interesting stuff. I work with a large Usenet archive (1980–2013). The comp.os.minix thread “What would you like to see most in minix?” has 86 posts in it. 8 are from August 1991. The other 78 run from 26 Aug 2011, the day after the post’s 20th anniversary, to May 2013. Nothing is dated in between.

1991: The first question back was whether it needed an MMU. Linus: “Yes, it needs a MMU (sorry everybody)… Simply, I’d say that porting is impossible.” On the 64 MB task segments: “Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task – tough cookies.” Two days later, on the task limit: “Fragmentation is evil,” and “I don’t want to be on the machine when someone is spawning >64 processes, though :-)”

2011–2013: Mostly thank-you notes, and the quote headers show at least seven languages. A few favorites, anonymous:

“Good work from the future XD”
“I’ll be back in 10 years to read this and see how far I’ve come.”
“What is this Linux thing? Is it still updated? Does it support the Minix file system?”
“What?? No floppy support? I’m out!”
“Sounds like it might have a future. Keep at it!”
“And without minix Mr. Torvalds would probably have done some nice windows programs. Thank /you/ Mr. Tannenbaum!”

Someone also pasted the whole “I’d just like to interject for a moment… GNU/Linux” speech, which is why the thread has a few confused replies.

Caveats: dates come from message headers, and threads are rebuilt from Message-ID/References, so the nesting in this one is unreliable. I’ve listed posts by date.

Disclosure: I license this archive commercially (about 405M posts, 18k newsgroups, with a free sample on Hugging Face). I’m posting this because the thread is fun, not as a pitch. If you’d like another group or era dug up like this, tell me.

https://redd.it/1x49j2h
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