MINIX has traditionally been an operating system with an eye toward education. Both versions 1 and 2 of the MINIX system were designed to be useful for students learning about operating systems. The code behind MINIX was small and clean, making it a practical study tool in this complex field.

I saw an article the other day, repeating the mistaken view that there was Minix code in an early version of Linux. I knew that was not true, because for one thing Linus told us it was not true years ago. And Andrew Tanenbaum confirmed that Linus didn't use any Minix code, as did Eric Raymond.

Andrew Tanenbaum: «...A microkernel is much better engineered and is more modular and easier to understand. Monolithic kernels are still too big and unreliable. My metric is the TV set. The system should run for 10 years with a total of zero failures for 99.9% of the users...»