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With current technology it is possible to put four floppy disk drives in a personal computer. It is just that doing so would be pointless.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

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Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: March 16
Academic
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Physicist
Professor
Programmer
Writer
New York City
New York
Andrew Stuart Andy Tanenbaum
Andrew Tanenbaum
Andy Tanenbaum
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum
Would
Drives
Current
Currents
Computer
Personal
Technology
Floppy
Possible
Disk
Four
Pointless

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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
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UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate.
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The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small.
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I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience.
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The only real argument for monolithic systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that microkernel systems can be just as fast as monolithic systems.
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A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack.
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XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files
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I really am not angry with Linus. Honest. He's not angry with me either.
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However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process.
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I can type faster than I can point. And my mother told me that pointing is impolite.
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A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year.
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A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring.
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If anyone had realized that within 10 years this tiny system that was picked up almost by accident was going to be controlling 50 million computers, considerably more thought might have gone into it.
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Writing a portable OS is not much harder than a nonportable one, and all systems should be written with portability in mind these days.
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Microkernels are not a pipe dream. They represent proven technology.
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