Andrew S. Tanenbaum's Personal FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) Sheet

Your name is German, you live in The Netherlands, but you write almost as well as a native English speaker. What's the scoop?
My paternal grandfather was born in Chorostkow, currently in Ukraine, historically in Poland, at the time under Austro-Hungarian management. He came to the U.S. in 1914. I was born in New York and grew up in White Plains, NY. I went to Amsterdam as a postdoc and have sort hung around ever since.

Where did you go to school?
High School: White Plains High School
College: M.I.T.
Ph.D.: University of California at Berkeley

Which one did you like best?
High school was ok, but my real love was the stage crew, of which I was electrician. Nobody likes M.I.T. People respect it. I respect it. But like it? Does anyone like taking a drink from a fire hose? I am still in awe of the place. I loved Berkeley and the Bay Area.

Did you experience culture shock going from M.I.T. to Berkeley?
Oh my goodness. Yes. It was so strange to be in an environment with people having I.Q.'s below 150 and where it wasn't necessary to study 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep up.

What did you do with all your new-found time?
I spent a lot of time working for the Sierra Club and lobbying in Sacramento for a bill to protect San Francisco Bay from developers. I am still a member of the Sierra Club, and proud of it.

Do you have any hobbies?
My wife says that playing with the computer is my hobby. A case could be made for genealogy and travel, though.

What countries have you been to?
Hard to say, with countries coming and going like flies these days. I use the rule that what counts is what it was called when I was there (e.g., I have visited the USSR, but not Russia) Also, it only counts if I passed through immigration (although Karachi has the best airport WCs in the world, I don't regard my visit there as a trip to Pakistan). Using these ground rules, I have visited the following countries. Some visits were for conferences or giving talks; others were on vacation.
Algeria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malta, Morocco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, The Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, The USSR, and The United States.

Did you take notes on all these places?
Yes. Copious notes. In fact I wrote a travel book, but it has not been published because it is Politically Incorrect. Being Politically Incorrect is one of those little no-no's in academia these days, like being a Pinko in the era of Sen. McCarthy (Joe, not Gene).

What is Amsterdam like?
It is a pleasant, peaceful city, not too big, not too small, just right. I like the weather--dull gray and drizzly most of the year. Great weather for being indoors with a warm computer.

What inspired you to produce a personal FAQ?
See Computer Networks, 3rd edition, page 663.

How much email do you get?
Too much. Much as I might like to, I really cannot help undergraduates all over the world with their homework or help graduate students choose thesis topics, or write tenure letters for assistant professors I have never heard of or give product recommendations, or tell you how to set up your network or help you find references to interesting papers or help you find a job or engage in a discussion about your favorite topic or ... Nevertheless, I am constantly being asked to do all these things, and in great volume.

Do you speak Dutch?
The experts differ on that one. I'm pretty good at the big stuff (nouns, adjectives and verbs), poor on the little stuff (prepositions, relative conjunctions), and hopeless on articles. Will somebody please explain to me why 'ezel' (donkey) is masculine, 'paard' (horse) is neuter and 'antilope' (antilope) is feminine?

Why do you work at a university?
When I was in college, I worked at IBM one summer to earn money. One day I wore a shirt that wasn't the right shade of white. My coworkers informed me of my transgression and made suggestions for improving matters. In great detail. That's when I figured out that maybe the industrial experience was not for me.

How do you pronounce Vrije Universiteit ?
Phonetically, just like it is spelled.

Do you teach?
Sure. I teach courses on computer architecture, networks, and operating systems.

Do you do research?
I give it the old college try, but the university is attempting to turn me into a Mandarin. I work on the Amoeba project, the Paramecium project, and Globe project with my grad students, but less than I would like.

Are you proud of your (ex) Ph.D. students?
Of course. They are all so smart. I'm a regular mother hen. See my home page for the list.

Can I be your grad student?
Probably not. The system here is not like the U.S., where you apply for admission in January for being a grad student in September. Grad students are legally employees, not students, and I have only two grad students positions, both of which are spoken for. My grad students are generally taken from the ranks of my undergraduates. This incestuous practice is one of the many things I learned at M.I.T.

Can I be an undergraduate at the Vrije Universiteit?
Possibly, but the language of instruction is Dutch.

Do you do much administration?
Yes. I am Dean of the Graduate School ASCI .

Anything else?
I am a member of the governing board that runs the VU's Computer Science Dept.

Does that have any redeeming social value?
I get a free cheese sandwich at our weekly lunch meeting.

What do you actually do all day?
Go to meetings :-( .

What do you actually do all evening?
Write books and software (at home).

How many books have you written and published?
Like with counting countries, it depends. If each text book counts for one point, then five. If second and third editions count separately, make that nine. If you want to throw in the 486-page MINIX manual, it becomes 10. If you want to count the foreign language translations, add a whole bunch.

What languages have your books been translated into?
Bulgarian, Castillian Spanish, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mexican Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian.

Castillian Spanish and Mexican Spanish?
Yeah. The Spaniards refuse to read Mexican Spanish, even though they are perfectly capable of it. Prentice Hall has a big operation in Mexico and has translated all my books for the Latin American market, but the Spaniards simply ignore the Mexican translations and translate all the books again from the English.

Who is Bram?
This is Bram .

Who is Sweetie pi ?
She was Bram's predecessor, may she rest in peace.

Have you written any books besides computer books?
I have writen a cookbook, How to Prepare Your Input , and the aforementioned unpublished travel book.

What is your favorite food?
Homemade chocolate chip cookies.

What computers do you use?
At the VU I have a SPARC workstation. My research group has a rack with 80 single board computers, each containing a 50 MHz SPARC, 32 MB of RAM, and one or more network interfaces. It is the only machine I have every had with more RAM (2.4 GB) than disk (2 GB). However, I do all my writing at home on a cheap local Pentium clone.

What OS do you run?
I run MINIX on the Pentium. It is small and fast. I like speed and dislike features. Features (e.g., window systems) slow things down.

Which editor do you use for producing books?
I use the elle editor (a stripped down emacs clone, but very fast). I am probably the only elle user in the world, but I still like it. I have a mouse, but don't have a mouse driver for MINIX and have never felt the need to write one. Typing "rm x y z" is a lot faster than clicking five times and then having to convince the system that you really, truly, mean it and this is not a mistake and that you are consenting adult over 18 and that you completely understand the consequences and you still want to do it.

Do you like WYSIWYG systems?
Definitely not. I can type faster than I can point. Also, I can add a couple of pages of material to the start of a chapter, then skip down 175 pages to add a new problem to the end of the file. Skipping 175 pages after adding new material using elle takes maybe 100 msec--I hit the END key and the screen is full instantly. Having to wait until some WYSIWYG editor reformatted 175 pages would be unbearable.

What typesetting system do you use?
All my typesetting is done using troff. I don't have any need to see what the output will look like. I am quite convinced that troff will follow my instructions dutifully. If I give it the macro to insert a second-level heading, it will do that in the correct font and size, with the correct spacing, adding extra space to align facing pages down to the pixel if need be. Why should I worry about that? WYSIWYG is a step backwards. Human labor is used to do that which the computer can do better. Also, using troff means that the text is in ASCII, and I have a bunch of shell scripts that operate on files (whole chapters) to do things like produce a histogram by year of all the references. That would be much harder and slower if the text were kept in some manufacturer's proprietary format.

What's wrong with LaTeX?
Nothing, but real authors use troff.

What do you think of MS-DOS?
It is better than Windows. At least it has a command line interface, albeit a pretty feeble one.

What do you think of Linux?
I have never used it. People tell me that if you like lots of bells and whistles, it is a nice system. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semeseter. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux.

Is MINIX dead?
Oh no. Far from it. It is simply focused on the target area it was always focused on: education. The excursion into hackerland was a detour. A co-author, Al Woodhull, and I are rewriting the MINIX book based on the new, POSIX-compliant, version of MINIX which Kees Bot is producing. It will still be aimed at having students be able to learn the principles of operating systems and most of a real system in one semester.

Are there any other MINIX developments in the works?
Paul Ashton and his students have produced a version of MINIX that runs on top of Solaris on the SPARC, which will be popular at universities. The second edition of the book will contain the full system, including all the source code, on a CD-ROM in the back of the book. We hope that the book will be published in late 1996.

Have you ever written any software besides MINIX?
Around 1980 I produced a compiler-writing system called the Amsterdam Compile Kit (ACK) that was used at hundreds of universities and companies all over the world for producing compilers for half a dozen languages and over a dozen machines. For information, see my paper in the Communications of the ACM, Sept. 1983, pp. 654-660. I am also in charge of the Amoeba project, which has produced a microkernel-based distributed operating system that is freely available to universities via the Web. I have written many papers on Amoeba, for example, Communications of the ACM , Dec. 1990, pp. 46-63.

What are you most proud of?
Having been elected Fellow of the ACM.

What is your philosophy of life?
I can't make up my mind. It is either

KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid

or

Get it right the first time.

Computer Networks 3/e  FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Sheet

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