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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]

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]

Teaching[edit]

Books[edit]

Tanenbaum's textbooks on computer science include:

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]

Fellow of the

ACM

Fellow of the for outstanding contributions to research and education in computer networks and operating systems.[34]

IEEE

Member of the [35]

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

IEEE Computer Society Tech. Committee on Distributed Processing Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2022

Eurosys Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015

Honorary doctorate from Petru Maior University, Targu Mures, Romania, 2011

Winner of the TAA for classic textbooks for Modern Operating Systems, 2010

McGuffey award

Coauthor of the Best Paper Award at the LADC Conference, 2009

Winner of a 2.5 million euro Advanced Grant, 2008

European Research Council

Flame Award 2008 [36] for his many contributions to systems design and to openness both in discussion and in source

USENIX

Honorary doctorate from Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania

Coauthor of the Best Paper Award at the Real-Time and Network Systems Conf., 2008

Winner of the 2007 [37]

IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal

Coauthor of the Best Paper Award at the USENIX LISA Conf., 2006

Coauthor of the Best Paper for High Impact at the IEEE Percom Conf., 2006

Academy Professor, 2004

Winner of the 2005 PPAP Award for best education on computer science software

Winner of the 2003 TAA for classic textbooks for Computer Networks

McGuffey award

Winner of the 2002 TAA Texty Award for new textbooks

Winner of the 1997 ACM for contributions to computer science education

SIGCSE

Winner of the 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award

Coauthor of the 1984 ACM Distinguished Paper Award

SOSP

Bologna, Italy, July 12, 2022

ICDCS 2022

San Diego, May 18, 2022

Qualcomm Security Summit

Online Event, September 14, 2020

RIOT Summit 2020

Archived August 18, 2015, at the Wayback Machine Sankt Augustin, Germany, August 22, 2015

FrOSCon 2015

Ottawa, Canada, June 12, 2015

BSDCan 2015

Archived May 28, 2015, at the Wayback Machine Amsterdam May 28, 2015

HAXPO 2015

Rome Italy, March 28, 2015

Codemotion 2015

Veldhoven, The Netherlands, November 2, 2010

SIREN 2010

Brussels, Belgium, February 7, 2010

FOSDEM

Changsha, China, November 5, 2009

NSCNE '09

Athens, Greece, September 25, 2009

E-Democracy 2009 Conference

Sankt Augustin, Germany, August 23, 2008

Free and Open Source Conference

XV Archived May 28, 2020, at the Wayback Machine of the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, March 13, 2008

Semana Informática

25 year anniversary conference, Amsterdam, November 7, 2007

NLUUG

in Sydney, Australia, January 17, 2007

linux.conf.au

Academic IT Festival in Cracow, Poland, February 23, 2006 (2nd edition)

Brighton, England, October 24, 2005

ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles

Tanenbaum has been keynote speaker at numerous conferences, most recently

contains an interview with Andrew Tanenbaum

Minix Article in Free Software Magazine

publications indexed by Google Scholar

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

DYNAMIX, used to demonstrate the internals of MINIX 1.3

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