BSDCan2015 - ZI
BSDCan 2015
The Technical BSD Conference
Andy Tanenbaum
Andrew S. Tanenbaum was born in New York City and raised in White Plains, NY. He has an S.B.from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Prof. Tanenbaum is the principal designer of three operating systems: TSS-11, Amoeba, and MINIX. MINIX was the first open-source UNIX clone. When MINIX was first released, one of the early users was Linus Torvalds, who quickly began changing it and adding new features until almost everything was gone and he had developed a new operating system--Linux.
Tanenbaum also developed a number of other open-source software systems. These include The Amsterdam Compiler Kit in the 1970s (which foreshadowed the Java Virtual Machine developed by Sun decades later), Amoeba (cloud computing back in the 1980s), and Globe (a distributed system in the 1990s). For this work he received the USENIX lifetime achievement Award in 2008.
Tanenbaum is also the author or coauthor of five books, which together have been translated in more than 20 languages. All in all, there are over 177 editions, as shown on www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/book_covers .
In 2004, Tanenbaum became an Academy Professor, which carried with it a 5-year grant totalling 2 million euro to do research on reliable operating systems based on MINIX. In 2008, he received a prestigious European Research Council grant of 2.5 million euro to do continue this research. MINIX 3 is now an open-source system aimed at highly reliable embedded systems. It has been downloaded over 600,000 times from www.minix3.org.
Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won numerous awards from ACM, IEEE, and other organizations (listed on his Wikipedia page).