Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Andy Tanenbaum
MINIX
Microkernels
Electoral-vote.com
Scientific career
FieldsDistributed computing[1][2]
Operating systems[3][4]
ThesisA Study of the Five Minute Oscillations, Supergranulation, and Related Phenomena in the Solar Atmosphere (1971)
Doctoral advisorJohn M. Wilcox
Doctoral studentsHenri Bal
Frans Kaashoek
Werner Vogels[5]
Websitecs.vu.nl/~ast
pearsonhighered.com/tanenbaum

Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum (born March 16, 1944), sometimes referred to by the handle ast,[6] is an American–Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.[7][8]

He is the author of

federal elections in the United States
.

Biography

Tanenbaum was born in

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[

VU University Amsterdam. On July 9, 2014, he announced his retirement.[11]

Teaching

Books

Tanenbaum's textbooks on computer science include:

His book, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and

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.[10] They have appeared in over 175 editions and are used at universities around the world.[15]

Doctoral students

Tanenbaum has had a number of

PhD
students who themselves have gone on to become widely known computer science researchers. These include:

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

Vrije Universiteit, University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, and Leiden University. 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, 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.[16]

MINIX

In 1987, Tanenbaum wrote a clone of

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.

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

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:

Electoral-vote.com

In 2004, Tanenbaum created

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.[31]

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 over Al Franken
. 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 and Nevada.

Electoral-vote.com incorrectly predicted Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 United States presidential election. 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.[32]

Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate

The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a famous debate between Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds regarding kernel design on Usenet in 1992.[33]

Awards

Honorary doctorates

Tanenbaum in Târgu Mureș
Tanenbaum is 4th from left

Keynote talks

Tanenbaum has been keynote speaker at numerous conferences, most recently

References

  1. S2CID 8028479. Archived
    from the original on April 17, 2024. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-13-239227-3
    .
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-0-13-600663-3
    .
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-0-13-219908-7
    .
  5. ^
    hdl:1871/10357
    .
  6. Usenet: [email protected]. Archived
    from the original on January 22, 2011. Retrieved November 27, 2006.
  7. ^ Works by Andrew S. Tanenbaum at Open Library
  8. ^ Andrew S. Tanenbaum at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  9. ^ 2004 article Archived May 24, 2004, at the Wayback Machine about Linux, the Usenet debate, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
  10. ^ a b c "Andrew S. Tanenbaum's FAQ". Archived from the original on December 6, 2008. Retrieved April 25, 2023.
  11. ^ "Retirement of Prof. Andy Tanenbaum". Archived from the original on March 29, 2023. Retrieved March 29, 2023.
  12. ISBN 978-0-13-148521-1
    .
  13. ISBN 978-0-13-540800-1
    .
  14. ISBN 978-0-13-142938-3
    .
  15. ^ Andrew S. Tanenbaum - Publications Archived May 9, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  16. ^ Andrew S. Tanenbaum - Publications, Colloquia section Archived May 9, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  17. ^ "Amazon.com: Operating Systems Design and Implementation (3rd Edition) (Prentice Hall Software Series): Andrew S Tanenbaum, Albert S Woodhull: Books". Archived from the original on May 28, 2020. Retrieved August 29, 2017.
  18. ^ Some notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle Archived August 18, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  19. ^ "USENIX April 06" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on August 7, 2007. Retrieved July 17, 2007.
  20. ^ "Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Professor at the Vrije Universiteit". Archived from the original on January 11, 2010. Retrieved October 29, 2009.
  21. ^ Minnich, Ronald. "Replace your exploit-ridden firmware with a Linux kernel" (PDF). schd.ws. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 31, 2018. Retrieved October 8, 2023.
  22. ^ Tanenbaum, Andrew. "An Open Letter to Intel". Vrije Universiteit Department of Computer Science. Archived from the original on August 27, 2023. Retrieved October 8, 2023.
  23. ^ dahitokiri (April 3, 2019). "Andrew Tanenbaum's famous 1992 comp.os.minix newsgroup posting in which he criticizes Linux's monolithic kernel as well as Linus Torvald's first response in a very long thread". r/programming. Archived from the original on June 11, 2023. Retrieved October 8, 2023.
  24. ^ Schoon, Ben (May 11, 2022). "Numbers from Google I/O: 3x growth for Wear OS, 3 billion active Android devices, more". 9to5 Google. Archived from the original on May 12, 2023. Retrieved October 8, 2023.
  25. S2CID 1147771. Archived
    (PDF) from the original on August 26, 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2022.
  26. S2CID 9181192. Archived
    (PDF) from the original on September 23, 2021. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  27. ^ Noordende, Guido van ’t; Brazier, Frances M. T.; Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (2002). Mansion: A Structured Middleware Environment for Agents (PDF) (Report). Division of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Archived from the original on August 26, 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2022.
  28. S2CID 1513191. Archived
    (PDF) from the original on May 9, 2019. Retrieved July 21, 2022.
  29. S2CID 10004092. Archived
    from the original on April 17, 2024. Retrieved November 2, 2020.
  30. S2CID 11923232. Archived
    from the original on April 17, 2024. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  31. ^ a b "The Votemaster FAQ". Archived from the original on November 2, 2004. Retrieved February 26, 2017.
  32. ^ "ElectoralVote". Archived from the original on November 1, 2020. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
  33. ^ "LINUX is obsolete". Archived from the original on March 28, 2023. Retrieved March 29, 2023.
  34. ^ "IEEE Fellows 1998 | IEEE Communications Society". Archived from the original on September 27, 2023. Retrieved September 17, 2023.
  35. ^ "Andrew Tanenbaum". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on July 21, 2015. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
  36. ^ "USENIX Flame Award". Archived from the original on October 6, 2012. Retrieved October 24, 2008.
  37. ^ "IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 24, 2010. Retrieved November 24, 2010.

External links

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