David James Brown | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 (age 67–68) |
| Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania (BS,MS) St John's College, Cambridge (PhD) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
David James Brown (born 1957) is an Americancomputer scientist. He was one of a small group atStanford University that helped to develop the computer system that later became the foundational technology ofSun Microsystems, and was a co-founder ofSilicon Graphics.
Brown received his primary and secondary school education inDelmar, New York, and then studied at theUniversity of Pennsylvania,Moore School of Electrical Engineering where he received a B.S.E. degree in 1979 and an M.S.E. under advisorRuzena Bajcsy in 1980.[1]
In 1984, Brown was introduced toDavid Wheeler, who invited him to join theUniversity of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as a doctoral candidate. In October 1986, he matriculated atSt John's College,University of Cambridge,England to pursue aPh.D. degree. His dissertation introduced the concept ofUnified Memory Architecture.[2] This idea has subsequently been widely applied — such as byIntel in their processors and platform architecture of the late 1990s and onward.[2]
Brown became a member of the research staff in the Computer Science Department atStanford University in 1981, where he worked on theSUN workstation research project withAndreas Bechtolsheim, prior to the establishment ofSun Microsystems.[3]
In 1982, Brown was one of the group of the seven technical staff from Stanford (along withKurt Akeley, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Mark Hannah, Mark Grossman, andCharles "Herb" Kuta) who joinedJim Clark to formSilicon Graphics.[4][5]
Brown andStephen R. Bourne formed the Workstation Systems Engineering group atDigital Equipment Corporation. Together they built the group responsible for the introduction of theDECstation line of computer systems.[6]
In 1992, Brown joinedSun Microsystems. He helped to establish the process used for the company's system software architecture, and then went on to define the application binary interface forSolaris, Sun's principal system software product.[3][7]Later, Brown worked on Solaris's adoption ofopen-source software and practices, and then its technologies for energy-efficient computing.[6][8]
In 1998, Brown was elected to the Council of theAssociation for Computing Machinery,[9] and in 2003 became a founding editor of theACM Queue magazine, producing several articles through 2010.[10][11][12][13][8]
