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by John P. Linderman

Two names I never expected to appear in one article. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/media/mit-jeffrey-epstein.html?…> Very sad, whether true or not. I knew Minsky in the way students know their professors. He was on my thesis committee. I liked and admired him.

5 years, 9 months

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Happy birthday, Marvin Minsky!

by Dave Horsfall

We gained Marvin Minsky on this day in 1927; he was an AI researcher, computer scientist, invented neural networks etc, and is now thought to be cryogenically preserved. -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

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Happy birthday, WWW!

by Dave Horsfall

In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee outlined plans for something he called the "world wide web". -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

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Harvard Mk I

by Dave Horsfall

Dedicated on this day in 1944, it was conceived by Dr. Howard Aiken; the Wikipedia entry for it has a fascinating history, and it's a wonder that it worked at all! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

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In Memoriam: Edsger Dijkstra, and happy birthday Jon Postel!

by Dave Horsfall

We lost computer pioneer Edsger Dijkstra in 2002; he gave us ALGOL, structured programming, semaphores, and ranted against the GOTO statement (much to the distress of the Fortranites and their spaghetti coding). Oh, and a certain Prof. Goto used to complain that everybody wanted to eliminate him :-) However, we gained Jon Postel in 1943; with umpteen RFCs to his name, he could pretty much be described as the Father of the Internet (but note that he edited most of the RFCs, not authored them, but deserves credit all the same). -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

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In memoriam: Per Brinch Hansen

by Dave Horsfall

We lost him in 2007; he was known for working with monitors and concurrent programming etc, and authored "Operating System Principles" and "The Architecture of Concurrent Programs". -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

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Happy birthday, Jay W. Forrester and 386BSD!

by Dave Horsfall

A computer pioneer, he is credited with the invention of core memory; fascinating stuff, when you realise that a "read" involves a couple of write cycles :-) Sense windings, etc... And 386BSD was released on this day in 1992, when William and Lynne Jolitz started the Open Source movement; well, that's what my notes say, and corrections are welcome (I know that Gilmore likes to take credit for just about everything). -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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In Memoriam: Robert Fano

by Dave Horsfall

We lost him in 2016, and he used to work at MIT; unfortunately that's all the details that I have for him (apart from being born 11/11/17). -- Dave

5 years, 11 months

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Re: [COFF] In Memoriam: Robert Fano

by Rudi Blom

Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fano Robert Fano, computing pioneer and founder of CSAIL, dies at 98 Professor emeritus helped launch field of information theory and developed early time-sharing computers. http://news.mit.edu/2016/robert-fano-obituary-0715

5 years, 11 months

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RIP Fernando Corbató

by Dan Cross

Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multics mailing list. Fernando Corbató has passed away at 93. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/fernando-corbato-dead.html Clem organized the wonderful Unix 50 event at the LCM two days ago, where we saw a working 6180 front panel on display (backed by a virtual DPS-8m running Multics!). This is our heritage and our history, let us not forget where we came from. - Dan C.

5 years, 11 months

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