> x86 will die out and RISC architectures will dominate the market It wasn't just Tanenbaum who was wrong about that. Billions of dollars were dumped into RIS

> x86 will die out and RISC architectures will dominate the market It wasn't just Tanenbaum who was wrong about that. Billions of dollars were dumped into RISC architectures on the assumption that x86 wouldn't scale. Microsoft committed to an expensive rewrite of Windows (or OS2) to make it portable. Apple considered x86 and decided to bet on RISC instead. So this wasn't just some wacky college professor opinion, the industry thought RISC was a sure thing. (Linus of course didn't really care, he just wanted something to run on his 386 clone.) edit: it bothers me that this debate is always presented without context. Torvalds is a PhD student busy reinventing a 20 year old unix kernel design, and Prof. Tanenbaum is pointing out he isn't advancing the state-of-the-art, which is totally correct. The fact that Linux turned out to be really useful and popular is mostly aside the point - the advancement was Torvald's open source management, not the kernel design.