I'm totally with you that questioning Tannenbaum's legacy is pretty poor form, but your interview questions sound designed to filter out anyone who doesn't share your exact interests, which is a real shame. A better follow-up than ending the interview upon a candidate not knowing who he is would be to describe his achievements (as you did here) and then ask the candidate to tell you what they know about someone else interesting who you may or may not already know all about.
This has nothing to do with cultural bias. It's just basic CS stuff that anyone with "CS" in their resumes should know about. Heck, even undergraduate students will probably have "AST" tattooed inside their brains in the first semester alone.
I'm sorry to be picking on you but this is one of the things that is absolutely wrong in our field: we don't learn anything from history. We don't know what was being researched in the 70's and proceed to reinvent the wheel over and over thinking we somehow have magical brains that are unearthing some concepts for the first time in human history.
The traditional CS curriculum should adopt a mentality of "ok, you now understand at which point in history we are in CS? Know most of the past inventions? Fine, now proceed to build on top of them and stop wasting everybody's time with your rediscoveries".
I don't think you're picking on me, and I wasn't trying to suggest that such a question is cultural bias. What I meant is just that people in general tend to think the things they know about are the most interesting things, and that people who don't know about those things are deficient. But by definition they can't know about things they don't know about, which may be just as interesting. So my proposed replacement question just acknowledges and tries to work around that phenomenon. I doubt it is actually critical for people to be super familiar with Tannenbaum's work specifically, it is just an indirect way of assessing intellectual curiosity and CS chops, which I think my question would also achieve.
I pretty much agree with everything else you said, and I wish I knew more about the history of computing myself, since I've lost a lot of my memory of my college course on it to the sands of time. I wonder if there's a good survey book. Maybe AST wrote one...
Another good interview technique is "did you actually read what I said". Things like when I said it's an open ended question, asked about 3 of the seminal minds in CS at least one of which a CS graduate would have bumped up against, and that the candidate can focus on whatever they want to. Just a tip for your next interview.
> If they don't know who AST is, the interview is probably over. We continue if they can discuss pretty much any of the 6-7 seminal, award winning CS textbooks he wrote, the other major projects he lead like the Amsterdam Compiler Kit or the Amoeba distributed operating system, or the other contributions he made to networking, distributed systems, languages, computer architecture, operating systems or information security (he did publish nearly 200 journal papers over 43 years as a professor).
