Right now working In: Professor, retired
Was born: February 1934 in Winterthur, Switzerland
Written Books:
PASCAL - User Manual and Report
Programming in Modula-2
Theory and Techniques of Compiler Construction
Algorithms & Data Structures
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
Little Story:
Prof. Wirth took his degree in electrical engineering from the ETH Zurich in 1959. Afterwards, he studied at Laval University, Canada. In 1963 he received his doctorate under Prof. H.D. Huskey at the University of California in Berkeley with a scholarship from the Ford Foundation. From 1963 to 1967 he taught as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University and later at the University of Zurich. In 1968 he was appointed full Professor of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich. His chief interests were in software engineering and its tools, in particular programming languages. In 1970 he devised the language Pascal, in 1980 Modula-2, and in 1988 Oberon. He designed the Lilith computer and in 1986 the Ceres computer. Subsequently, he became involved in the construction of tools for circuit design with programmable components.
Awards and Honors:
IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneer Award
IBM Europe Science and Technology Prize
Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Societe Europeenne pour la Formation des Ingenieurs
Foreign Associate, US Academy of Engieering
ACM, A. M. Turing Award
Website: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/
Right now working In: Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN)
Was born:
Written Books:
Little Story:
One of the decisions that Tomlinson had to make as he experimented with e-mail was how to distinguish between messages that were headed out onto the network and those that were addressed to users in the same office. He studied the keyboard for a symbol that didn't occur naturally in people's names and that wasn't a digit. The designation for mailboxes on remote computers that he came up with was the now ubiquitous @ symbol. "It designates a place, and it's the only preposition on the keyboard," he points out. Though it turned out to be a decision with far-reaching impact, at the time Tomlinson gave it only "30 to 40 seconds of thought."
Awards and Honors:
Annual Webby Awards
Website: http://www.dotbleu.com/history/tomlinson.htm
