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Carl Sassenrath | |
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 Sassenrath in 2004 | |
| Born | 1957 (age 68–69) California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of California, Davis |
| Occupations | Systems programmer Programming language designer |
| Employer(s) | Commodore International Apple Inc. Hewlett-Packard Roku, Inc. |
| Known for | AmigaOS,CDTV,REBOL |
Carl Sassenrath (born 1957 inCalifornia) is an architect ofoperating systems andcomputer languages. He broughtmultitasking topersonal computers in 1985 with the creation of theAmiga Computer operating system kernel,[1] and he is the designer of theREBOL computer language, REBOL/IOS collaboration environment, the Safeworlds AltME private messaging system, and other products. Carl was a Principal Engineer atRoku, Inc. until his retirement in November 2023.[2]
Carl Sassenrath was born in 1957 to Charles and Carolyn Sassenrath in California. His father was achemical engineer involved in research and development related to petroleum refining, paper production, and air pollution control systems.
In the late 1960s his family relocated from theSan Francisco Bay Area to the small town ofEureka, California. From his early childhood Sassenrath was actively involved in electronics,amateur radio, photography, and filmmaking. When he was 13, Sassenrath began working forKEET, aPBS public broadcasting television station. A year later he became acameraman forKVIQ (ABC affiliate then) and worked his way up to beingtechnical director and director for news, commercials, and local programming.
In 1980 Sassenrath graduated from theUniversity of California, Davis with aB.S. in EECS (electrical engineering andcomputer science). During his studies he became interested inoperating systems,parallel processing,programming languages, andneurophysiology. He was a teaching assistant for graduate computer language courses and a research assistant inneuroscience and behavioral biology. His uncle, Dr. Julius Sassenrath, headed the educational psychology department atUC Davis, and his aunt, Dr. Ethel Sassenrath, was one of the original researchers ofTHC at theCalifornia National Primate Research Center.
During his final year at the university, Sassenrath joinedHewlett-Packard's Computer Systems Division as a member of theMulti-Programming Executive (MPE)file system design group forHP 3000 computers. His task was to implement acompiler for a new type of control language calledOutqueue—a challenge because the language was both descriptive and procedural. A year later, Sassenrath became a member of the MPE-IV OSkernel team and later part of the HPE kernel group.
While at HP Sassenrath became interested in minimizing the high complexity found in most operating systems of that time and set out to formulate his own concepts of amicrokernel-based OS. He proposed them to HP, but found the large company complacent to the "smaller OS" ideas.
In late 1981 and early 1982, Sassenrath took an academic leave to do atmospheric physics research forNational Science Foundation atAmundsen–Scott South Pole Station. Upon returning, Sassenrath reached an agreement with HP to pursue independent research into new areas of computing, includinggraphical user interfaces andremote procedure call methods of distributed computing.
Later in 1981, impressed by the new computing ideas being published fromXerox PARC, Sassenrath formed an HP project to develop the modern style of window-basedmouse-drivenGUIs. The project, calledProbus (for professional business workstation) was created on a prototypeSun Microsystems workstation borrowed fromAndy Bechtolsheim while he was atStanford University. Probus clearly demonstrated the power of graphical user interfaces, and the system also incorporatedhyperlinks and earlydistributed computing concepts.
At HP, Sassenrath was involved with and influenced by a range of HP language projects includingAda,Pascal,Smalltalk,Lisp,Forth,SPL, and a variety of experimental languages.
In 1982, Carl Sassenrath joinedAmiga Computer, Inc., a small startup company inSilicon Valley. AsManager of Operating Systems he was asked to design a new operating system for theAmiga, an advanced multimedia personal computer system that later became theAmiga.
As a sophisticated computer for its day (Amiga used 28DMA channels along with multiplecoprocessors), Sassenrath decided to create atrue real-time multitaskingoperating system within amicrokernel design. This was a novel approach for 1983 when other personal computer operating systems were single tasking such asMS-DOS (1981) and theMacintosh (1984).
The Amiga multitasking kernel was also one of the first to implement a microkernel OS methodology based on areal-timemessage passing (inter-process communication) core known asExec (for executive) with dynamically loaded libraries and devices as optional modules around the core.
This design gave the Amiga OS a great extensibility and flexibility within the limited memory capacity of computers in the 1980s. Sassenrath later noted that the design came as a necessity of trying to integrate intoROM dozens of internal libraries and devices including graphics, sound,graphical user interface,floppy disk,file systems, and others. This dynamic modular method also allowed hundreds of additional modules to be added by external developers over the years.
After the rerelease of the Amiga after 3 tries in 1985, Sassenrath left Commodore-Amiga[3] to pursue new programming language design ideas when Amiga went bankrupt in 1994.
In 1986, Sassenrath left Silicon Valley for the mountains of Ukiah valley, 2 hours north of San Francisco. From there he founded multimedia technology companies such as Pantaray, American Multimedia, and VideoStream. He also implemented theLogo programming language for theAmiga, managed the software OS development forCDTV, one of the firstCD-ROM TVset-top boxes, and wrote the OS for Viscorp Ed, one of the first Internet TV set-top boxes.
In 1996, after watching the growth and development of programming languages likeJava,Perl, andPython, Sassenrath decided to publish his own ideas within the world of computer languages. The result wasREBOL, therelative expression-based object language. REBOL is intended to be lightweight, and specifically to support efficientdistributed computing.
Sassenrath describes REBOL as a balance between the concepts ofcontext andsymbolism, allowing users to create new relationships between symbols and their meanings.[citation needed] By doing so, he attempts to merge the concepts ofcode,data, andmetadata. Sassenrath considers REBOL experimental because it provides greater control over context than most other programming languages. Words can be used to form different grammars in different contexts (calleddialecting). Sassenrath claims REBOL is the ultimate endpoint for the evolution ofmarkup language methodologies, such asXML.[citation needed]
In 1998, Sassenrath founded REBOL Technologies, a company he still runs. The company has released several versions of REBOL and produced additional products such as REBOL/View, REBOL/Command, REBOL/SDK, and REBOL/IOS.
Sassenrath implemented REBOL V3.0 and released it toGitHub on December 12, 2012:https://github.com/rebol/r3.
Since 2010, Sassenrath had worked atRoku, Inc. in product development. He retired in November 2023.[4]
Sassenrath lives inUkiah,California, where he grows grapes and makes wine, and is interested inamateur radio, video production,quantum electrodynamics, and boating. He volunteers with the Television Improvement Association, a community organization that brings free, over-the-air television broadcasts into the Ukiah area.
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