Textbook of Linux

b. 1944, New York City — Professor of computer science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Also known as: Tanenbaum, Andy Tanenbaum, AST

Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum is an American-Dutch computer scientist, best known as the creator of Minix — a microkernel Unix-like system he wrote in 1987 as a teaching operating system to accompany his textbook Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. A young Linus Torvalds learned OS internals from Minix and, frustrated by its limitations and licensing, set out to write his own kernel in 1991.

Tanenbaum's textbooks — on operating systems, networks, and distributed systems — are standard undergraduate references worldwide. His Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate on Usenet in 1992, arguing that microkernels were technically superior to Linux's monolithic design, remains a much-cited piece of programming history. Torvalds never changed the architecture; Tanenbaum's position has softened, but neither has conceded the underlying technical argument.

Minix itself lives on inside every modern Intel CPU — the Intel Management Engine runs a Minix 3 variant as its firmware. Tanenbaum was never consulted, and only discovered this through press reporting.