Andrew S. Tanenbaum began developing MINIX (Mini-Unix) in 1984.
The project originated as an educational operating system designed to accompany his textbook Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, first published in 1987. Tanenbaum’s goal was to provide university students with a fully functional, UNIX-like OS that was simple enough to study yet realistic enough to run on the modest IBM PC hardware of the era (the Intel 8088/8086 architecture).
So, to summarize the timeline:
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1984–1986: Core development of MINIX at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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1987: First public release of MINIX, distributed with the book.
This project indirectly influenced the creation of Linux, since Linus Torvalds used MINIX as both a learning tool and a platform for his early kernel development in 1991.
When he began developing MINIX in the mid-1980s, the IBM PC (and compatibles) indeed cost around $1,500–$2,000 USD—for example, an IBM PC XT with a modest configuration (128 KB–256 KB RAM, no hard drive, floppy-based, monochrome monitor) typically retailed around $1,200–$1,800.
Now, by absolute numbers that was a lot—roughly $4,000–$5,000 in 2025 dollars. But in relative terms, this was the first time students and individual hobbyists could feasibly buy a genuine general-purpose computer capable of running a full UNIX-like OS. Before that, computing access required expensive minicomputers or mainframes costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So when Tanenbaum said the IBM PC was “affordable to students,” he meant relatively affordable—as in:
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Affordable compared to minicomputers (PDP-11s, VAX systems).
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Affordable for a dedicated computer science student willing to save or use university hardware.
It wasn’t “cheap” in a consumer sense, but it democratized system-level experimentation, which is precisely why MINIX (and later Linux) could emerge at all.