Andrew S. Tanenbaum (born 1944) is the head of Department of Computer Systems, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He teaches courses about Computer Organization and Operating Systems.
He is well recognized for his computer books, especially
He has written Minix, a free UNIX clone, which was the inspiration for the Linux operating system. He became involved in a famous Usenet discussion in 1992 with Linus Torvalds, 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.