Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum (born March 16, 1944), sometimes referred to by the handle ast, is an American–Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

He is the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and has written multiple computer science textbooks regarded as standard texts in the field.

He regards his teaching job as his most important work.

He received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from MIT in 1965 and his PhD degree in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971.

He moved to the Netherlands to live with his wife, who is Dutch, but he retains his United States citizenship.

He taught courses on Computer Organization and Operating Systems and supervised the work of PhD candidates at the VU University Amsterdam.

It was started sometime before 1981 and Andrew Tanenbaum was the architect from the start until version 5.5.

In 1987, Tanenbaum wrote a clone of UNIX, called MINIX (MINi-unIX), for the IBM PC.

It was targeted at students and others who wanted to learn how an operating system worked.

Consequently, he wrote a book that listed the source code in an appendix and described it in detail in the text.

The source code itself was available on a set of floppy disks.

Within three months, a Usenet newsgroup, comp.os.minix, had sprung up with over 40,000 subscribers discussing and improving the system.

One of these subscribers was a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds, who began adding new features to MINIX and tailoring it to his own needs.

In the early 1990s, the Dutch government began setting up a number of thematically oriented research schools that spanned multiple universities.

These schools were intended to bring professors and PhD students from different Dutch (and later, foreign) universities together to help them cooperate and enhance their research.

Tanenbaum was one of the cofounders and first Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI).

This school initially consisted of nearly 200 faculty members and PhD students from the Vrije Universiteit, University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, and Leiden University.

They were especially working on problems in advanced computer systems such as parallel computing and image analysis and processing.

On October 5, 1991, Torvalds announced his own (POSIX-like) kernel, called Linux, which originally used the MINIX file system but is not based on MINIX code.

Although MINIX and Linux have diverged, MINIX continues to be developed, now as a production system as well as an educational one.

The focus is on building a highly modular, reliable, and secure operating system.

The system is based on a microkernel, with only 5000 lines of code running in kernel mode.

The rest of the operating system runs as a number of independent processes in user mode, including processes for the file system, process manager, and each device driver.

The system continuously monitors each of these processes, and when a failure is detected is often capable of automatically replacing the failed process without a reboot, without disturbing running programs, and without the user even noticing.

MINIX 3, as the current version is called, is available under the BSD license for free.

Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com, a website dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States.

Tanenbaum was born in New York City and grew up in suburban White Plains, New York, where he attended the White Plains High School.

His paternal grandfather was born in Khorostkiv in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Tanenbaum remained dean for 12 years, until 2005, when he was awarded an Academy Professorship by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, at which time he became a full-time research professor.

ASCI has since grown to include researchers from nearly a dozen universities in The Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

ASCI offers PhD level courses, has an annual conference, and runs various workshops every year.

The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is a toolkit for producing portable compilers.

On July 9, 2014, he announced his retirement.

Tanenbaum's textbooks on computer science include:

His book, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and MINIX were Linus Torvalds' inspiration for the Linux kernel.

In his autobiography Just for Fun, Torvalds describes it as "the book that launched me to new heights".

His books have been translated into many languages including Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Mexican Spanish, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish.

They have appeared in over 175 editions and are used at universities around the world.

Tanenbaum has had a number of PhD students who themselves have gone on to become widely known computer science researchers.

These include: