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 Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

at the

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...

in the

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Neth ...

. He is the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also ...

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.2004 article
about Linux, the Usenet debate, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com, a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States.

Biography

Tanenbaum was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and grew up in suburban

White Plains, New York (Always Faithful) , image_seal = WhitePlainsSeal.png , seal_link = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = , subdivision_type1 = State , subdivision_name1 = , subdivisi ...

. He is

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

. His paternal grandfather was born in Khorostkiv in the

Austro-Hungarian empire Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise o ...

. He received his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...

degree in

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which re ...

from MIT in 1965 and his PhD degree in astrophysics from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1971. Tanenbaum also served as a lobbyist for the

Sierra Club The Sierra Club is an environmental organization with chapters in all 50 United States, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. The club was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by Scottish-American preservationist John Muir, who be ...

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

United States citizenship Citizenship of the United States is a legal status that entails Americans with specific rights, duties, protections, and benefits in the United States. It serves as a foundation of fundamental rights derived from and protected by the Constitu ...

. He teaches courses on Computer Organization and Operating Systems and supervises the work of PhD candidates at the

VU University Amsterdam The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded researc ...

. On July 9, 2014, he announced his retirement.

Teaching

Books

Tanenbaum's textbooks on computer science include: * ''Structured Computer Organization'' (1976) * ''Computer Networks,'' co-authored with David J. Wetherall and Nickolas Feamster (1981) * '' Operating Systems: Design and Implementation,'' co-authored with Albert Woodhull (1987) * '' Modern Operating Systems'' (1992) * ''Distributed Operating Systems'' (1994) * ''Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms,'' co-authored with Maarten van Steen (2001) His book, ''Operating Systems: Design and Implementation'' and MINIX were

Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and, historically, the lead developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Android. He also c ...

' inspiration for the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whic ...

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.

Doctoral students

Tanenbaum has had a number of PhD students who themselves have gone on to become widely known computer science researchers. These include: * Henri Bal, professor at the

Vrije Universiteit The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

Frans Kaashoek Marinus Frans (Frans) Kaashoek (born 1965, Leiden) is a Dutch computer scientist, entrepreneur, and Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for cont ...

, professor at MIT * Sape Mullender, researcher at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

* Robbert van Renesse, professor at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teac ...

* Leendert van Doorn, distinguished engineer at the

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

Corporation * Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging

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

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other bei ...

Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology ( nl, Technische Universiteit Delft), also known as TU Delft, is the oldest and largest Dutch public technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands. As of 2022 it is ranked by QS World University Rankings among ...

, and

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, as a reward to the city of L ...

. They were especially working on problems in advanced computer systems such as 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 The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

, 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.

Projects

Amsterdam Compiler Kit

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.

MINIX

In 1987, Tanenbaum wrote a clone of

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

, called MINIX (MINi-unIX), for the

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

. 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 Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

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

, who began adding new features to MINIX and tailoring it to his own needs. On October 5, 1991, Torvalds announced his own (

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

-like) kernel, called

, 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 In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

, 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 Minix 3 is a small, Unix-like operating system. It is published under a BSD-3-Clause license and is a successor project to the earlier versions, Minix 1 and 2. The project's main goal is for the system to be fault-tolerant by detecting and rep ...

, as the current version is called, is available under the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

for free.

Research projects

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 A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to pu ...

. These projects include: *

Amoeba An amoeba (; less commonly spelled ameba or amœba; plural ''am(o)ebas'' or ''am(o)ebae'' ), often called an amoeboid, is a type of cell or unicellular organism with the ability to alter its shape, primarily by extending and retracting pseudo ...

* Globe * Mansion * Orca * Paramecium *

RFID Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. An RFID system consists of a tiny radio transponder, a radio receiver and transmitter. When triggered by an electrom ...

Guardian * Turtle F2F

Electoral-vote.com

In 2004, Tanenbaum created Electoral-vote.com, a web site analyzing

opinion polls An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll (although strictly a poll is an actual election) is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinion ...

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." 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 John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is an American attorney, politician and diplomat who currently serves as the first United States special presidential envoy for climate. A member of the Forbes family and the Democratic Party, he p ...

. Mentioning that he supported the Democrats, he revealed his identity on November 1, 2004, the day before the election, and also stating his reasons and qualifications for running the website. Through the site he also covered the 2006 midterm elections, correctly predicting the winner of all 33 Senate races that year. For the 2008 elections, 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 except for Minnesota, where he predicted a 1% win by

Norm Coleman Norman Bertram Coleman Jr. (born August 17, 1949) is an American politician, attorney, and lobbyist. From 2003 to 2009, he served as a United States Senate, United States Senator for Minnesota. From 1994 to 2002, he was mayor of Saint Paul, Mi ...

over

Al Franken Alan Stuart Franken (born May 21, 1951) is an American comedian, politician, media personality, and author who served as a United States senator from Minnesota from 2009 to 2018. He gained fame as a writer and performer on the television comed ...

. After 7 months of legal battling and recounts, Franken won by 312 votes (0.01%). In 2010, he correctly projected 35 out of 37 Senate races in the Midterm elections on the website. The exceptions were

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the wes ...

and

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a state in the Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the 7th-most extensive, ...

. Electoral-vote.com incorrectly predicted Hillary Clinton would win the

2016 United States presidential election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticke ...

. The website incorrectly predicted Clinton would win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida. Electoral-vote.com did not predict a winner for Nevada, which Clinton would win. The website predicted the winners of the remaining 44 states and the District of Columbia correctly.

Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate

The

Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a written debate between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding the Linux kernel and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet disc ...

was a famous debate between Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds regarding kernel design on

in 1992.

Awards

* Fellow of the ACM * Fellow of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operatio ...

* Member of the

* 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 McGuffey award for classic textbooks for Modern Operating Systems, 2010 * Coauthor of the Best Paper Award at the LADC Conference, 2009 * Winner of a 2.5 million euro

European Research Council The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific ...

Advanced Grant, 2008 * USENIX Flame Award 2008 for his many contributions to systems design and to openness both in discussion and in source * 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 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 McGuffey award for classic textbooks for Computer Networks * Winner of the 2002 TAA Texty Award for new textbooks * Winner of the 1997 ACM

SIGCSE SIGCSE is the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computer Science Education (CSE), which provides a forum for educators to discuss issues related to the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of c ...

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

Honorary doctorates

* On May 12, 2008, Tanenbaum received an

honorary doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hono ...

from Universitatea Politehnica din București. The award was given in the academic senate chamber, after which Tanenbaum gave a lecture on his vision of the future of the computer field. The degree was given in recognition of Tanenbaum's career work, which includes about 150 published papers, 18 books (which have been translated into over 20 languages), and the creation of a large body of open-source software, including the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, Amoeba, Globe, and MINIX. * On October 7, 2011, Universitatea Petru Maior din Târgu Mureș ( Petru Maior University of Târgu Mureș) granted Tanenbaum the Doctor Honoris Causa (honorary doctorate) title for his remarkable work in the field of computer science and achievements in education. The academic community is hereby honoring his devotion to teaching and research with this award. At the ceremony, the Chancellor, the Rector, the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and Letters, and others all spoke about Tanenbaum and his work. The pro-rector then read the 'laudatio,' summarizing Tanenbaum's achievements. These include his work developing MINIX (the predecessor to Linux), the RFID Guardian, his work on Globe, Amoeba, and other systems, and his many books on computer science, which have been translated in many languages, including Romanian, and which are used at Petru Maior University.

Keynote talks

Tanenbaum has been keynote speaker at numerous conferences, most recently
ICDCS 2022
Bologna, Italy, July 12, 2022
Qualcomm Security Summit
San Diego, May 18, 2022
RIOT Summit 2020
Online Event, September 14, 2020
FrOSCon 2015
Sankt Augustin, Germany, August 22, 2015
BSDCan 2015
Ottawa, Canada, June 12, 2015
HAXPO 2015
Amsterdam May 28, 2015 * Codemotion 2015 Rome Italy, March 28, 2015
SIREN 2010
Veldhoven, The Netherlands, November 2, 2010 *

FOSDEM Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and ...

Brussels, Belgium, February 7, 2010
NSCNE '09
Changsha, China, November 5, 2009
E-Democracy 2009 Conference
Athens, Greece, September 25, 2009
Free and Open Source Conference
Sankt Augustin, Germany, August 23, 2008 * X
Semana Informática
of the

Instituto Superior Técnico Instituto Superior Técnico MHSE • MHIP (IST, also known colloquially as Técnico, and stylized TÉCNICO LISBOA) is a public school of engineering and technology, part of University of Lisbon. It was founded as an autonomous school in 1911 ...

, Lisbon, Portugal, March 13, 2008 *

NLUUG NLUUG (formerly known as The Netherlands Local Unix User Group) is an association of professional UNIX / Linux users in the Netherlands. The group aims to increase and extend the awareness and use of Open Standards (including UNIX) and similar op ...

br>25 year anniversary
conference, Amsterdam, November 7, 2007 * linux.conf.au in Sydney, Australia, January 17, 2007 * Academic IT Festival in Cracow, Poland, February 23, 2006 (2nd edition)
ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles
Brighton, England, October 24, 2005

References

External links

Minix Article in Free Software Magazine
contains an interview with Andrew Tanenbaum *
The MINIX 3 Operating System MINIX Official Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tanenbaum, Andrew S. 1944 births American political writers American male non-fiction writers American technology writers Computer systems researchers American computer scientists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellow Members of the IEEE Free software programmers Kernel programmers Living people MIT Department of Physics alumni Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences MINIX Scientists from New York City University of California, Berkeley alumni Academic staff of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Information technology in the Netherlands Computer science educators Jewish American writers European Research Council grantees 21st-century American Jews American emigrants to the Netherlands