Obituaries
Robert Taylor, Innovator Who Shaped Modern Computing, Dies at 85
Bob Taylor died last week and received the honor of a significant New York Times obituary. For extra points, check out the comments section. Alan Kay left a splendid note. His work at NASA, ARPA, and PARC are among his many achievements.
We also lost Harry Huskey the same week. A little more about his work in computing:
Professor Huskey joined the University of California, Santa Cruz faculty in 1967, after what would be considered an already full career by most people's standards. He earned his Ph.D. in 1943 from Ohio State University and took his first job as an assistant professor teaching mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. Shortly thereafter he secured a top-secret development position at UPenn, unaware of any details about the project. It turned out to be the ENIAC computer: the first fully programmable computer designed in the United States. ENIAC was developed for the US Navy in support of the war effort.
After the war, in 1946, Professor Huskey worked for a year with Alan Turing in England. In 1950 he moved to California to continue his work in systems design and architecture of smaller and more powerful computers and computer systems, a theme that would follow his career. He joined UC Berkeley in 1955 as a professor of Electrical Engineering, and while there he supervised the Ph.D. thesis of Niklaus Wirth who later developed the PASCAL programming language.