Today is the day that the Votemaster of Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 revealed himselft o be computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the creator of MINIX, a precursor to GNU/Linux. I know it’s asking a lot on the day before the U.S. presidential election to turn your attention even for a moment to something arcane as operating systems, but Prof. Tanenbaum has a nice essay about the origins of MINIX.

I set out to write a minimal UNIX clone, MINIX, and did it alone. The code was 100% free of AT&T;’s intellectual property. The full source code was published in 1987 as the appendix to a book, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, which later went into a second edition co-authored with Al Woodhull. MINIX 2.0 was even POSIX-conformant. Both editions contained hundreds of pages of text describing the code in great detail. A box of 10 floppy disks containing all the binaries and source code was available separately from Prentice Hall for $69.

Although the source code was not free, it still was within the reach of a computer-science student, and that was Tanenbaum’s goal. (His essay also aims to dispute the claim by Ken Brown, a Washington think-tank president, that no single individual could write an operating system and that therefore GNU/Linux must have been “stolen” by Linux creator Linus Torvalds)

The same impulse behind Minix — teaching people how things work — has informed Tanenbaum’s “Electoral Vote Predictor 2004″ page, which commonly includes with a day’s update a methodological explanation about how polling results are aggregated. It’s a great site for learning about polls even as you’re tracking them.

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