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Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum
Born	1944 White Plains, New York
Residence	Amsterdam, Netherlands
Nationality	American
Other names	Andy ast (internet handle)
Known for	MINIX, Microkernels
Employer	Vrije Universiteit
Occupation	Professor

Dr. Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum (sometimes called ast)^[1] (born 1944) is a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is best known as the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and for his computer science textbooks, regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards his teaching job as his most important work.^[2]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Books 3 MINIX 4 Research Projects 5 Ph.D. Students 6 electoral-vote.com 7 Awards 8 Keynote Talks 9 Bibliography 10 References 11 See also 12 External link and reference

Tanenbaum was born in New York City and grew up in suburban White Plains, New York. He received his bachelor's degree in Physics from MIT in 1965. He received his doctorate in physics 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. As of 2004 he teaches courses about Computer Organization and Operating Systems, and supervises the work of Ph.D. candidates.

He is well recognized for his textbooks on computer science:

• Computer Networks, ISBN 0-13-066102-3
• Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, (co-authored with Albert Woodhull), ISBN 0-13-142938-8
• Modern Operating Systems, ISBN 0-13-031358-0
• Structured Computer Organization, ISBN 0-13-148521-0
• Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, (co-authored with Maarten van Steen), ISBN 0-13-239227-5

Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and MINIX [1] were Linus Torvalds' inspiration for the Linux kernel. In his autobiography Just For Fun (book), Torvalds describes it as "the book that launched me to new heights".

These five books have been translated into 20 languages: Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (for Brazil), Portuguese (for Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish (for Latin America), Spanish (for Spain), and Thai. They have appeared in over 120 editions and are used at universities around the world [2].

In 1987, Tanenbaum wrote the first open-source 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 [3] 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 [4], had sprung up with over 40,000 readers discussing and improving the system. One of these readers was a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds who began adding new features to MINIX and tailoring it to his own needs. On October 5, 1991, Torvalds announced his own (POSIX like) operating system, called Linux, which originally used the MINIX file system but is not based on MINIX code^{[citation needed]}.

Although MINIX and Linux have diverged, MINIX continues to be developed, now as a production system as well as an educational one [5]. The focus is on building a highly modular, reliable, and secure, operating system. The system is based on a microkernel, with only 4000 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 at www.minix3.org.

Tanenbaum has also been involved in numerous other research projects in the areas of operating systems, distributed systems, and ubiquitous computing, often as supervisor of Ph.D. students or a postdoctoral researcher. These projects include:

• Amoeba
• Globe
• Mansion
• Orca
• Paramecium
• RFID Guardian
• S3MS
• Turtle F2F

Tanenbaum has had a number of Ph.D. students who themselves have gone on to become famous computer science researchers. These include Henri Bal, a professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Frans Kaashoek, a professor at MIT, Sape Mullender, a researcher at Bell Labs, Robbert van Renesse, a professor at Cornell University, Leendert van Doorn, a fellow at the AMD Corporation, and Werner Vogels, the Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com.

In 2004 Tanenbaum created electoral-vote.com, a popular web site analyzing opinion polls for the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, using them to project the outcome in the Electoral College. The site also provided an electoral map. Surprising results on this map (such as, for example, a short period when Hawaii, traditionally Democratic, was listed as "Barely Bush") would often surface in popular discussion. Through most of the campaign period he kept his identity secret, referring to himself as "the Votemaster" and acknowledging only that he personally preferred Kerry. Tanenbaum, a Democrat, revealed his identity on November 1, 2004, the day prior to the election, also stating his reasons and qualifications for running the website [6]. The site also covered the 2006 midterm elections and correctly predicted the winner of all 33 Senate races that year. It recently began tracking the Presidential, Senate, and House races in 2008.

• Fellow of the ACM (1996)
• Fellow of the IEEE
• Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Academy Professor
• Coauthor of the Best Paper Award at the USENIX LISA Conference in Dec. 2006
• Coauthor of the Best Paper for High Impact at the 2006 IEEE Percom conference
• Winner of the 2006 IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal
• Winner of the 2003 TAA McGuffey Award for classic textbooks
• Winner of the 2002 TAA Texty Award for new textbooks
• Winner of the 1997 ACM SIGCSE for contributions to computer science education
• Winner of the 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award
• Coauthor of the 1984 ACM SOSP Distinguished Paper Award

Tanenbaum has been keynote speaker at numerous conferences, most recently

• linux.conf.au in Sydney, Australia, Jan. 17, 2007
• ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, Brighton, England, Oct. 24, 2005

• Books written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum published by Prentice Hall
• Academic publications by Andrew S. Tanenbaum from DBLP
• Publications list

1. ^ A. S. Tanenbaum (1992-01-29). "LINUX is obsolete". comp.os.minix. (Web link). Retrieved on 2006-11-27.
2. ^ 2004 article about Linux, the Usenet debate, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution

• Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate — famous friendly debate between Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds regarding kernel design
• Turtle F2F - anonymous friend-to-friend P2P software

• Professor Andrew S Tanenbaum at the Dept. of Computer Systems at VU
• Minix Article in Free Software Magazine contains an interview with Andrew Tanenbaum