Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum is a computer scientist long based at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where his email address ast@cs.vu.nl appears on the original 1992 newsgroup posts that made him famous outside academia. On his own FAQ page he describes MINIX as a continuing project, writing that he aims to “build an operating system that actually works all the time” and noting the European Research Council grant that funded MINIX 3.
Tanenbaum wrote MINIX as a teaching operating system, and his textbooks on operating systems and computer networks have been translated into many languages and used in classrooms around the world. His FAQ catalogs these editions and translations, and reflects a strong personal style, including his insistence that “real authors use troff.”
In January 1992 he opened the comp.os.minix thread titled “LINUX is obsolete,” reproduced in the O’Reilly book “Open Sources.” He began mildly, writing that “I haven’t commented much on LINUX,” before arguing that Linux’s monolithic, 386-specific design was a step backward compared with portable microkernel systems like MINIX.
His critique made him one half of one of the most cited debates in operating systems history. Tanenbaum later stressed that the exchange was technical rather than personal, writing “I REALLY am not angry with Linus” and that “He’s not angry with me either.”