About Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum (born March 16, 1944), sometimes referred to by the handle AST, is an American-born Dutch computer scientist and retired professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and has written multiple computer science textbooks regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards his teaching job as his most important work. Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com, a website dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States. == Biography == Tanenbaum was born in New York City on March 16, 1944, and grew up in suburban White Plains, New York, where he attended the White Plains High School. His paternal grandfather was born in Khorostkiv in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from MIT in 1965 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. As an undergraduate, he had obtained experience at computer programming, which helped him get a summer internship at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. After receiving his doctorate, he decided that he was more interested in programming. He became an assistant professor in Amsterdam based in part on his expertise in programming the university's new computer.
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