Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Andrew S. Tanenbaum was born on March 16, 1944, in New York City, a city that formed the backdrop for his early education. He attended White Plains High School before going on to study at the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A citizen of the United States, Tanenbaum built a career that carried him across the Atlantic to the Netherlands, where he worked for many years as a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, a position from which he has since retired as professor emeritus.
Throughout his career, Tanenbaum worked across several overlapping roles, functioning as a computer scientist, physicist, programmer, software developer, engineer, university teacher, and writer. He is sometimes identified by the handle AST. Among his contributions to the field, he is the creator of MINIX. His work earned him the ACM Software System Award, one of several honors recognizing the range of his professional output.
Tanenbaum has also received the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal and the SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education award, both of which acknowledge his sustained engagement with the teaching and communication of computer science. His career is catalogued under the Library of Congress Name Authority File under the authorized label "Tanenbaum, Andrew S., 1944-." He currently holds the position of professor emeritus at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Quotes by Andrew S. Tanenbaum
With current technology it is possible to put four floppy disk drives in a personal computer. It is just that doing so would be pointless.
But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a modern “free” OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that.
I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience.
Writing a portable OS is not much harder than a nonportable one, and all systems should be written with portability in mind these days.
A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year.
Unfortunately, the current generation of mail programs do not have checkers to see if the sender knows what he is talking about.
If anyone had realized that within 10 years this tiny system that was picked up almost by accident was going to be controlling 50 million computers, considerably more thought might have gone into it.
While most people can talk rationally about kernel design and portability, the issue of free-ness is 100% emotional.
UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate.