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He was born in New York City and raised in White Plains, NY. He received his bachelor's degree from MIT. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley in 1971. He and his wife moved to the Netherlands (her homeland), but he retains his United States citizenship. As of 2004 he teaches courses about Computer Organization and Operating Systems, and supervises the work of Ph.D. candidates.
He is well recognized for his textbooks on computer science, which are famous as standard texts in the field, particularly:
Minix was the inspiration for the Linux kernelLinux mascot Tux created by Larry Ewing. In computing, the Linux kernel is a free Unix-like operating system kernel created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and subsequently improved with the assistance of developers around the world. It was originally developed. Tanenbaum became involved in a famous UsenetUsenet or Unix User Network is a communications medium in which users read and post textual messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed newsgroups (incorrectly called bulletin boards because of their similarity for the unaware observer). The m discussion in 19921992 is a leap year starting on Wednesday. Events January January The Internet Society is formed. January 1 Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt replaces Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru as United Nations Secretary-General January 1 George H. Bush becomes the fi with Linus TorvaldsLinus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) began the development of Linux, an operating system kernel, and today acts as the project coordinator (or Benevolent Dictator for Life). Inspired by the teaching system Minix (developed by Andrew Tanenbaum), Linux's creator, about the merits of Linus's basic approach using a monolithic kernel instead of the microkernel-based designs that Tanenbaum believed were the way of the future. He went on to write the Amoeba distributed operating system.
In 2004 he created www.electoral-vote.com, a popular web site analyzing opinion polls for the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, using them to project the outcome in the Electoral College. Through most of the campaign period he kept his identity secret, referring to himself as "the Votemaster" and acknowledging only that he personally preferred Kerry. Tanenbaum, a Democrat, revealed his identity on November 1, 2004, the day prior to the election, also stating his reasons and qualifications for running the website [1].