Why was Tanenbaum wrong in the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debates?

Posted by Robz on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Robz
Published on 2012-03-21T22:55:13Z Indexed on 2012/03/22 17:41 UTC
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I was recently assigned reading from the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debates in my OS class. In the debates, Tanenbaum makes some predictions:

Microkernels are the future
x86 will die out and RISC architectures will dominate the market
(5 years from then) everyone will be running a free GNU OS

I was a one year old when the debates happened, so I lack historical intuition. Why have these predictions not panned out? It seems to me, that from Tanenbaum's perspective, they're pretty reasonable predictions of the future. What happened so that they didn't come to pass?

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