80's not 90's

[cagney]

FYI,
Wikipedia puts first release in 1987.

[bocke]

That's technically true. Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix was very lively in 1987-1989 according to the archives: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/search?q=after%3A1987-01-01%20before%3A1989-12-31

People sent patches and new programs to the newsgroup, although a lot of that was likely not accepted mainline because of the scope and goals of Minix (an educational OS for System Architecture course) and there was also probably the question of the license (which had changed to BSD-like license somewhere in early 00s, but at the time was propriatry).

In these kind of university courses, students would usually have to write some piece of software or driver on their own as part of the course, so having the minimal Unix-ish OS was enough for the purpose. It also had to be simple and understandable, so anything more complex was out of the question.

But, Dave is also technically right as the versions available here were released in 1990s. In fact, the most famous early version was 1.5 which was released in 1991 according to Wikipedia. This one was ported to several alternative platforms including Amiga, Atari Mint, MacOS and others. It was also a version Linus Torvalds used (on PC) while developing earliest versions of Linux kernel in 1991.

P.S. It's pretty interesting that some of these early projects that got contributions from the net weren't really that enthusiastic about contributed code for various reasons. One example being Minix and other being 386BSD by Bill Jolitz. On the other hand, Linus was very happy to accept contributions from the beginning.

[cagney]

Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix was very lively in 1987-1989

AST was clearly more than happy to accept contributions, such as bug fixes and ports to new architectures. This seems to be inconsistent with:

P.S. It's pretty interesting that some of these early projects that got contributions from the net weren't really that enthusiastic about contributed code for various reasons. [...] On the other hand, Linus was very happy to accept contributions from the beginning.

I'd not compare 386BSD and Minix.

[bocke]

Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix was very lively in 1987-1989

AST was clearly more than happy to accept contributions, such as bug fixes and ports to new architectures. This seems to be inconsistent with:

Honestly, I didn't get this impression while reading early posts in comp.os.minix. If your talking about 90s, it's possible. But still, there were various forks like Minix VMD or patches that weren't accepted in upstream like Bellcore MGR patches. So, my personal impression is that this was limited.

I'd not compare 386BSD and Minix.

You don't have to. There are probably more important things to concern yourself about than what some dude on internet said about some archaic parts of IT/UNIX history only 3 people on the internet care about. :)

[cagney]

Honestly, I didn't get this impression while reading early posts in comp.os.minix. If your talking about 90s, it's possible. But still, there were various forks like Minix VMD or patches that weren't accepted in upstream like Bellcore MGR patches.

The 80s.

There was always this tension between AST's goal of Minix being an educational tool for teaching OS internals to undergrads (self hosting, cheap h/w, KISS; Lions' Commentary on 6th edition Unix did set a high bar), and the hobbyists desire (there was nothing else available) to turn Minix into a general purpose high performance OS.

https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/ is an interesting read.