Microkernels, those were the times...
I bought the book. And that might have included floppy disks, I don't remember. And if I ever ran it, it wasn't for long or for much.
But just like Linus, I didn't really read the book in full.
I had already read the Unix v6 sources in full, in my CS classes at university.
When Linus decided that jumps to task state segments on a 80386 would make task switching fit on a singe page of code, I had been using QNX, UnixWare, Lynn's and Bill's 386BSD, and a competing µ-kernel called AX for for years: Linux combined the worst of everything and I ignored it for years, because I actually had full access to Unix and AX source codes, too, and could compare: I was not impressed by what I saw, I fully agreed with Jochen Liedke (of L4 fame).
QNX was really cool and very usable already on the tiniest 8086 even without any MMU and AX was likewise made for Suprenum supercomputers with lots of pure compute notes that had no I/O whatsoever. So in that sense Minux wasn't that much better than Linux as a badly made monolithic Unix clone, because it didn't make distributed computing the default.
The competition was Moshe Bar with his Mosix kernels or Transputers, who did that in hardware and at the Occam language level.
What completely destroyed all that computer science for a decade or two was the clock race: who would have thought that a lowly 8086 successor could outperform a "Cray on a chip" iAPX 860 and run at several Gigahertz?
Today it's all to multi-cores, but instead of dozens, it's millions of GPUs with thousands of cores each: all Unixoids were ever trying to do was to offer Multics abstractions at vastly inferior cost. And Multics was all about multiplexing a single incredibly powerful CPU among as many users as possible to create the illusion of everyone having their own [single] CPU.