Alan Kotok | |
|---|---|
 Kotok atCSAIL in 2006 | |
| Born | (1941-11-09)November 9, 1941 Philadelphia,Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | May 26, 2006(2006-05-26) (aged 64) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Clark University |
| Known for | World Wide Web Consortium,Digital Equipment Corporation,Spacewar!,computer chess |
| Spouse | Judith Kotok |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Digital Equipment Corporation,World Wide Web Consortium |
Alan Kotok (November 9, 1941 – May 26, 2006) was an Americancomputer scientist known for his work atDigital Equipment Corporation (Digital, or DEC) and at theWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C).Steven Levy, in his bookHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first truehackers.
Kotok was a precocious child who skipped two grades before college. At MIT, he became a member of theTech Model Railroad Club, and after enrolling in MIT's first freshman programming class, he helped develop some of the earliestcomputer software including adigital audio program and what is sometimes called the firstvideo game (Spacewar!). Together with his teacherJohn McCarthy and other classmates, he was part of the team that wrote theKotok-McCarthy program which took part in the first chess match between computers.
After leaving MIT, Kotok joined the computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he worked for over 30 years. He was the chief architect of thePDP-10 family of computers, and created the company's Internet Business Group, responsible for several forms of Web-based technology including the first popularsearch engine.[1] Kotok is known for his contributions to theInternet and to theWorld Wide Web through his work at the World Wide Web Consortium, which he and Digital had helped to found, and where he served as associate chairman.
Alan Kotok was born inPhiladelphia,Pennsylvania, and was raised as an only child inVineland, New Jersey.[2][3] During his childhood, he played with tools in his father'shardware store and learnedmodel railroading.[2][3] He was a precocious child, skipping two grades at high school, and he matriculated atMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of 16 in the fall of 1958 and anMBA fromClark University in 1978.[4][5] Although his interest in computers began atVineland High School, his first practical experience of computing came at MIT; there he developed a habit of working late at night when more computer time was available.[2][3]
At MIT, Kotok earned bachelor's and master's degrees inelectrical engineering.[6] He was influenced by teachers such asJack Dennis andJohn McCarthy and by his involvement in the student-organizedTech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), which he joined soon after starting college in 1958.[2]
While a graduate student and member of TMRC, Dennis introduced his students to theTX-0 on loan to MIT indefinitely fromLincoln Laboratory. In the spring of 1959, McCarthy taught the first course inprogramming that MIT offered to freshmen.[7] Outside classes, Kotok, David Gross,Peter Samson, Robert A. Saunders and Robert A. Wagner, all friends from TMRC, reserved time on the TX-0.[8] They were able to use the TX-0 as a personal,single-user tool rather than abatch processing system, thanks to Dennis, faculty advisors and John McKenzie, the operations manager.[9]
In September 1961, Digital donated aPDP-1 to MIT.[10] Although not an expensive machine, and with a tiny (by today's standards) 9K of memory, it had a Type 30 precisionCRT display. Dennis oversaw the PDP-1 lab, located next door to the TX-0. Students from TMRC worked as support staff, programming the new computer.[8]
With classmatesElwyn Berlekamp, Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Wagner, Kotok began to develop McCarthy'sIBM 704 chess-playing program in 1959.[11][12] Kotok described their work in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 41. The Kotok-McCarthy chess program at MIT would also become Kotok's S.B. thesis.[11] "The chess group" graduated in 1962 and at that point their program was able to play chess "comparable to an amateur with about 100 games experience" on anIBM 7090.[13][14]
They came to learn a great deal about chess, but neither Kotok nor McCarthy were known as chess players.Mikhail Botvinnik, three times world chess champion, wrote in his bookComputers, Chess and Long-Range Planning that the Kotok–McCarthy program's "rule for rejecting moves was so constituted that the machinethrew the baby out with the bath water."[15] The program drew criticism fromRichard Greenblatt, who later wroteMac Hack, which beat a person in tournament play,[16] and more recently, fromHans Berliner, when he looked back on it in 2005.[17] During theCold War,Kotok-McCarthy played (and lost to) the bestSoviet chess program in the first match between computer programs.[18]
Kotok contributed to one of the earliestinteractive computer games, Spacewar!,[19] and is sometimes called the firstvideo game.[20]
Kotok did not write any of theSpacewar! code, but he did travel to Digital to obtain a sine-cosine routine that Russell needed.[21] Graetz credited Kotok and Saunders with building thegame controllers that allowed two people to play side by side.[19]
Edward Fredkin, at one time atBBN Technologies (BBN) (Digital's first customer for the PDP-1), McCarthy, Russell, Samson, Kotok andHarlan Anderson met in May 2006 for a panel to celebrate the Computer History Museum's restoration of a PDP-1 (withGordon Bell on tape).[22] Their presentations illustrated the contributions of TX-0 and PDP-1 users to earlysoftware.
Early PDP-1 users wroteprogramming software including anassembler translated from the TX-0 over one weekend in 1961.[8] Kotok later wrote aninterpreter for theLisp programming language in TECO macros.[8]
Kotok and his classmates are described as the first true hackers in the bookHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution bySteven Levy.[7]
After graduating from MIT, Kotok started atDigital Equipment Corporation as one of the company's first few dozen employees; in his 34-year career with the company, he held senior engineering positions in storage, telecommunications and software.[3][23] He retired in 1996.[11]
He began in 1962 by writing aFortrancompiler for thePDP-4, before contributing to the development of thePDP-5 instruction set.[2] Under Harlan Anderson (vice president of engineering), principal architectGordon Bell led a team, including Kotok as an assistant logic designer, which developed the first commercialtime-sharing computer, thePDP-6, designed and delivered in 1963–1964.[3] Aiming at a scientific market, Digital machines had a 36-bit word length to accommodateartificial intelligence work in Lisp and to compete withIBMmainframe computers.[24] In 1965, in what may have been the first around-the-world networking connection,[25] a PDP-6 at theUniversity of Western Australia in Perth was operated from Boston in the United States via atelex link.[26]
Kotok became the principal architect and designer of several generations of thePDP-10,DECsystem-10 andDECSYSTEM-20.[6] Bell, Thomas Hastings, Richard Hill and Kotok wrote that the DECSystem-10 accelerated the transition from batch-processing to time-sharing andsingle-user systems.[27] With Kotok as system architect, theVAX 8600 (known as Venus) was introduced in 1984 as the highest-performance computer in Digital's history to date, operating up to 4.2 times faster than the standard at the time.[6][28]
Kotok expanded his areas of expertise from engineering into teaching and business: following a suggestion of Berlekamp, he taught logic design at theUniversity of California, Berkeley during the 1975–1976 academic year; he also earned a master's degree in business administration fromClark University in 1978,[29] which prepared him for later work at Digital and W3C.
While at Digital, Kotok recognized the Web's potential, and helped to found theWorld Wide Web Consortium. Early in 1994, in Zürich, Switzerland,Tim Berners-Lee had met withMichael Dertouzos to discuss starting a new organization at MIT.[31] In April 1994, Kotok, Steve Fink, Gail Grant and Brian Reid from Digital traveled toCERN in Geneva to speak with Berners-Lee about the need for a consortium to createopen standards and coordinate Web development. Berners-Lee mentions the pivotal meeting with Digital in his bookWeaving the Web.[32]
As technical director of Digital's Corporate Strategy Group, Kotok was instrumental in creating the Internet Business Group which advocated early adoption and integration of Internet and Web-based technologies.[23] Digital created theAltaVistasearch engine, the Internetfirewall, theWeb portal, thewebcast and liveelection returns.[33][34] Digital continued its lead in Internet and Web development through difficult times, but Kotok questioned a corporate strategy that he believed consumed Web and Internet resources to sell Digital products like theAlphaServer.[35] For example, he saw a missed opportunity inMillicent, themicropayment system for buying and sellingWeb content for fractions of a U.S.cent.[36]
Kotok was a corporate consulting engineer for Digital 1962–1997, W3C Advisory Committee representative for Digital 1994–1996, vice president of marketing for GC Tech Inc. 1996–1997, member of the Science Advisory Board for Cylink Corp., a consultant forCompaq, and a content advisor for the Computer History Museum.[6][37]
Digital and GC Tech were early W3C members and were among the sponsors of the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW4) in 1995 in Boston.[38] Kotok coordinated abirds of a feather meeting onSelection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases on April 7, 1997, at WWW6 in Santa Clara, California.[39] In La Jolla, California, he presentedMicropayment Systems to the Electronic Payments Forum in 1997.[40]
Kotok joined W3C as associate chairman in May 1997.[29] His role involved managing contractual relations with W3C hosts and member organizations, coordinating the worldwide W3C Systems and Web Team services to millions of pages and resources on the W3C website, and maintaining the W3C host site at theMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he was a research scientist.[2][23][29]
While he was associate chairman, Kotok was a member of the W3C management team,[41] and worked closely with the W3C Advisory Board.[42] He helped to establish a new W3C office in India and worked with an internal task force to reduce membership fees in developing countries.[43] He was a major contributor to theW3C Patent Policy and chaired Patent Advisory Groups, including one forHTML.[44][45] He briefly served as Domain Leader of the Technology and Society Domain which at that time included W3C's activity in digital signatures, electronic commerce, public policy,PICS,RDF metadata,privacy, andsecurity.[46]
In 1977, at age 36, Kotok married Judith McCoy, a choir director and piano teacher on the faculty of theLongy School of Music.[3][47] They lived inHarvard, Massachusetts;Cambridge, Massachusetts; andCape May, New Jersey. The couple shared a love of 16th and 17th-century music andpipe organs, and toured historic pipe organs in Sweden, Germany, Italy and Mexico.[3] They had a daughter, Leah Kotok, and two stepchildren from Judith's prior marriage,[47] Frederica and Daryl Beck.[5][48]
Kotok recorded an oral history at theComputer History Museum in 2004.[2] He died at his home in Cambridge, apparently from aheart attack, on May 26, 2006, seven months after the death of his wife during her treatment for cancer.[3][48] He is survived by two daughters, a son, and three grandchildren.[11]
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