History
MINIX was written from scratch by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in the 1980s, as a Unix-like operating system whose source code could be used freely in education. The MINIX file system was designed for use with MINIX; it copies the basic structure of the Unix File System but avoids any complex features in the interest of keeping the source code clean, clear and simple, to meet the overall goal of MINIX to be a useful teaching aid. When Linus Torvalds first started writing his Linux operating system kernel (1991), he was working on a machine running MINIX, so the initial releases based a lot of functionality on Minix subsystems. Until the April 1992 introduction of the Extended file system, Linux used the MINIX file system. The format is still used by some Linux distributions for bootable disks and other situations where a simple and compact file system is needed.
Read more about this topic: MINIX File System
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