He was born in New York City and raised in White Plains, NY. He received his bachelor's degree from MIT. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley in 1971. Currently he teaches courses about Computer Organization and Operating Systems.

He is well recognized for his texts on computer science, which are famous as standard texts in the field, particularly:

Computer Networks, ISBN 0130661023 Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, ISBN 0136386776 Modern Operating Systems, ISBN 0130313580

Minix was the inspiration for the Linux kernel. Tanenbaum 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.

He went on to write the Amoeba distributed operating system