About the Authors | Operating Systems Design and Implementation (3rd Edition)

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Andrew S. Tanenbaum has an S.B. degree 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, The Netherlands, where he heads the Computer Systems Group. Until stepping down in Jan. 2005, for 12 years he had been Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, an interuniversity graduate school doing research on advanced parallel, distributed, and imaging systems.

In the past, he has done research on compilers, operating systems, networking, and local-area distributed systems. His current research focuses primarily on computer security, especially in operating systems, networks, and large wide-area distributed systems. Together, all these research projects have led to over 100 refereed papers in journals and conference proceedings and five books.

Prof. Tanenbaum has also produced a considerable volume of software. He was the principal architect of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, a widely-used toolkit for writing portable compilers, as well as of MINIX, a small UNIX clone. This system provided the inspiration and base on which Linux was developed. Together with his Ph.D. students and programmers, he helped design the Amoeba distributed operating system, a high-performance microkernel-based local-area distributed operating system. After that he was one of the designers of Globe, a wide-area distributed system intended to handle a billion users. All of this software is now available for free via the Internet.

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His Ph.D. students have gone on to greater glory after getting their degrees. He is very proud of them. In this respect he resembles a mother hen.

Prof. Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the the IEEE, and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also winner of the 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, winner of the 1997 ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education, and winner of the 2002 Texty award for excellence in textbooks. In 2004 he was named as one of the five new Academy Professors by the Royal Academy. His home page on the World Wide Web can be found at URL http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/.

Albert S. Woodhull has an S.B. degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He entered M.I.T. intending to become an electrical engineer, but he emerged as a biologist. He considers himself a scientist with an appreciation of engineering. For more than 20 years he was a faculty member in the School of Natural Science of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has been a visiting faculty member at several other colleges and universities. As a biologist using electronic instrumentation, he started working with microcomputers when they became readily available. His instrumentation courses for science students evolved into courses in computer interfacing and real-time programming.

Dr. Woodhull has always had strong interests in teaching and in the role of science and technology in development. Before entering graduate school he taught high school science for two years in Nigeria. He also spent several sabbaticals teaching computer science in Nicaragua, at the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua

He is interested in computers as electronic systems, and in interactions of computers with other electronic systems. He particularly enjoys teaching in the areas of computer architecture, assembly language programming, operating systems, and computer communications. He has worked as a consultant in the development of electronic instrumentation and related software, and as a computer system administrator.

He has many nonacademic interests, including various outdoor sports, amateur radio, and reading. He enjoys travelling and trying to make himself understood in languages other than his native English. He is a user and advocate of MINIX. He operates a Web server that runs MINIX and provides support for MINIX users. His personal home page is located there. You can find it at URL http://minix1.hampshire.edu/asw/.