| Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 16, 1944 New York City |
| Residence | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Nationality | United States |
| Other names | Andy ast (internet handle) |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Employer | Vrije Universiteit |
| Known for | MINIX, Microkernels |
Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum (sometimes referred to by the handle ast)[1] (born March 16, 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]
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He was born in New York City and grew up in suburban White Plains, New York. He received his B.Sc. degree in Physics from MIT in 1965. He received his Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Tanenbaum served as a lobbyist for the Sierra Club.[3] He moved to the Netherlands to live with his wife, who is Dutch, but he retains his United States citizenship. He teaches courses about Computer Organization and Operating Systems and supervises the work of Ph.D. candidates at the VU University Amsterdam.
He is well recognized for his textbooks on computer science:
Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and MINIX[4] 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, Mexican Spanish, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish.[5] They have appeared in over 120 editions and are used at universities around the world.[6]
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is a toolkit for producing portable compilers. It was started sometime before 1981,[7] 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[8] 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,[9] 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.[10]
Although MINIX and Linux have diverged, MINIX continues to be developed, now as a production system as well as an educational one.[11] 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[12] 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:
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 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 Ph.D. 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 Ph.D. students from the Vrije Universiteit, University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, and Leiden University working in the areas of advanced computer systems, especially parallel computing, and image analysis and processing. 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 Ph.D. level courses, has an annual conference, and runs various workshops every year.
In 2004 Tanenbaum created Electoral-vote.com, a web site analyzing opinion polls for the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, using them to project the outcome in the Electoral College. He stated that he created the site as an American who "knows first hand what the world thinks of America and it is not a pretty picture at the moment. I want people to think of America as the land of freedom and democracy, not the land of arrogance and blind revenge. I want to be proud of America again."[13] The site provided a color-coded map, updated each day with projections for each state's electoral votes. Through most of the campaign period Tanenbaum kept his identity secret, referring to himself as "the Votemaster" and acknowledging only that he personally preferred John Kerry. A libertarian who supports the Democrats, he revealed his identity on November 1, 2004, the day prior to the election, also stating his reasons and qualifications for running the website.[13] Through the site he covered the 2006 midterm elections, correctly predicting the winner of all 33 Senate races that year.
In 2008 he tracked the presidential, Senate, and House races. For the presidential election, he got every state right except for Indiana, which he said McCain would win by 2% (Obama won by 1%) and Missouri, which he said was too close to call (McCain won by 0.1%). He correctly predicted all the winners in the Senate races except for Minnesota, where he predicted a 1% win by Norm Coleman. After 7 months of legal battling, Al Franken won this race by 312 votes (0.01%).
Tanenbaum has been keynote speaker at numerous conferences, most recently