Quit showing your ignorance and lack of a computer science education. Tanenbaum wrote a book called Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, which is standard in any decent CS curriculum (among others he wrote). He wrote Minix from scratch as an example of the programming principles in the book, such as modularity and true microkernels.
Minix served as the inspiration for Linus Torvalds's Linux (resulting in the famous Tanenbaum/Torvalds clash over monolithic vs. microkernels). Before you say Linux was stolen again, realize that Tanenbaum has seen Linux and has stated no code was stolen from Minix.
With these clones born overseas you constantly have to wonder.
BTW, on your "foreign" kick, Tanenbaum is an American.
AR,
I was under the impression that his code was strongly based on UNIX (System VII I think)
He claims he wrote it from scratch but based on his deep involvement with the original Unix developers it's very possible he utilized some of their tools if not software along the way. He certainly had access to them so it's hard to say with any certainty it was a clean room implementation, even n3wbie is questioning you about it.