I wrote inet (the TCP/IP stack on MINIX) for two reasons: I like to come up with my own designs for everything and, most of all, I had to impress Andy Tanenbaum enough to become a Ph.D. student. Inet had to fit in with MINIX. In particular, it had to live with minimal changes to the MINIX code base. At the same time, there were quite a few areas where I felt sockets and the BSD TCP/IP implementation were wrong.

In hindsight, there is a lot that I did not know and got wrong. I this talk, I will look at how inet follows the structure of MINIX, what works, and what went wrong.