Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum (born March 16, 1944), sometimes referred to by the handle ast,[6] is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.[7][8]
Andy Tanenbaum
American
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.[9] Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com, a website dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States.
Biography[edit]
Tanenbaum was born in New York City and grew up in suburban White Plains, New York, where he attended the White Plains High School.[10] His paternal grandfather was born in Khorostkiv in the Austro-Hungarian empire.[10]
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. On July 9, 2014, he announced his retirement.[11]
Projects[edit]
Amsterdam Compiler Kit[edit]
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is a toolkit for producing portable compilers. It was started sometime before 1981 and Andrew Tanenbaum was the architect from the start until version 5.5.[16]
MINIX[edit]
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.[17] 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. 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.[18]
Although MINIX and Linux have diverged, MINIX continues to be developed, now as a production system as well as an educational one.[19] 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.[20] 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.
In 2017, Google discovered that the Intel Management Engine runs MINIX in ring -3.[21] After Tanenbaum read about this, he published an open letter to Intel, detailing conversations with Intel software engineers that occurred several years ago, where they wanted his assistance in modifying MINIX to work on "some secret project". He believes that Intel chose MINIX for this purpose because it is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license, which allowed Intel to modify the MINIX source code without freely distributing their modified version. In his letter, Tanenbaum claims that MINIX is the most widespread operating system,[22] and this is interpreted by the community as Tanenbaum believing that he has won the Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate.[23] It is hard to know if MINIX or Linux is more popular, as Intel does not publish chipset sales figures, and there is no direct way to find the number of systems running Linux or MINIX. However, Linux has seen much more widespread use in the server space, is widely used in embedded systems, and also runs on all Android phones, which account for at least 3 billion active devices,[24] meaning that it is likely that Linux is the most widespread operating system, although there is no concrete data to back up this claim.
Research projects[edit]
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 PhD students or a postdoctoral researcher. These projects include:
Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate[edit]
The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a famous debate between Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds regarding kernel design on Usenet in 1992.[33]
Tanenbaum has been keynote speaker at numerous conferences, most recently