Alan Kotok

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Alan Kotok
Kotok speaking in Boston in 2004. Photo: Richard Ishida
Kotok speaking in Boston in 2004. Photo: Richard Ishida
Born 9 November 1941
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died 26 May 2006
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Residence USA
Field computer science
Institution Digital Equipment Corporation, World Wide Web Consortium
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clark University
Known for World Wide Web Consortium, Digital Equipment Corporation, Spacewar!, computer chess
This article is about Alan Kotok who was associate chair of W3C. Alan B. Kotok who is the managing editor of Science Careers is also called Alan Kotok.

Alan Kotok (November 9, 1941 – May 26, 2006) was an American computer scientist. He was known for his contributions to the Internet and World Wide Web through his work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to computer engineering through his work at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and to gaming for his work on computer game and computer chess programs built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Kotok recorded a video oral history at the Computer History Museum in 2004.

Kotok appears in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution[1] by Steven Levy.

Kotok was born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania[2] though his family lived in Vineland in southern New Jersey. He was an only child. By age 3, Kotok survived an inquiry into an electrical outlet with a screwdriver, and by age 6, he could build and wire household lamps.[3] Kotok learned model railroading at his father's hardware store. Kotok skipped two grades and started college at age 16.[4]

Contents

At MIT, Kotok earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering.[5] He had influential teachers including Jack Dennis and John McCarthy. Kotok was a member of the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the Tech 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 the TX-0 on loan to MIT indefinitely from Lincoln Laboratory. In the spring of 1959, McCarthy taught the first course in programming MIT offered to freshmen.[6] Outside classes, David Gross, Kotok, Peter Samson, Robert A. Saunders and Robert A. Wagner, all friends from TMRC, reserved time.[7] They were able to use the TX-0 as a personal, single-user tool rather than a batch processing system, thanks to Dennis, faculty advisors and John McKenzie, the operations manager.[8]

In September 1961[9] DEC donated a PDP-1 with about 9K of memory and a Type 30 precision CRT 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.[7]

Main article: Kotok-McCarthy
From A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer known as Kotok-McCarthy
From A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer known as Kotok-McCarthy

Classmates Elwyn Berlekamp, Kotok, Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Wagner began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program in 1959. Kotok describes their work in MIT Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 41 and his bachelor's thesis. By the time "the chess group" graduated in 1962, their program played chess "comparable to an amateur with about 100 games experience" on an IBM 7090.[10][11]

Although they came to know a great deal about the game, neither Kotok nor McCarthy were known as chess players — later in life Kotok loved bridge.[12] Mikhail Botvinnik, who was the world champion of chess three times, wrote in his book Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning that the Kotok-McCarthy program's "rule for rejecting moves was so constituted that the machine threw the baby out with the bath water."[13] The program drew criticism from Richard Greenblatt[14] and more recently from Hans Berliner.[15] Yet in his Computer Chess History, Bill Wall calls the MIT program the first to play chess credibly. During the Cold War, Kotok-McCarthy played the best Russian chess program in the first match between computer programs.[16][17]

Main article: Spacewar
A control box for Spacewar! and T-Square
A control box for Spacewar! and T-Square
Spacewar! on a PDP-1. Image courtesy Computer History Museum
Spacewar! on a PDP-1. Image courtesy Computer History Museum

Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne Wiitanen conceived the computer game Spacewar! while working at Harvard University in 1961. Inspired by Marvin Minsky's Three Position Display they called the Minskytron, with their MIT classmates Dan Edwards, Kotok, Stephen D. Piner, Samson and Saunders, they had the first version running by early 1962. Coded by Russell, Spacewar! was one of the earliest interactive computer games.[18]

Kotok did not write any of the Spacewar! code. He did travel to DEC to obtain the sine-cosine routine[19] that Russell needed. Graetz credited Kotok and Saunders with building the game controllers which allowed two people to play side by side. Asked if the group invented the joystick, Kotok said no. NASA or some other organization had similar control boxes at the time. [20]

Samson replaced what were at first random points of light with Expensive Planetarium. Edwards sped up the display of the spaceships and added the central star, the center of gravity. Graetz added hyperspace.[18]

From a printout that Graetz provided, Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman and Vadim Gerasimov transcribed the source code and built a Spacewar! Java applet in 1999.[21] The applet is available at Gerasimov's web site where one can play Spacewar in a Web browser.

Stewart Brand and Annie Leibovitz celebrated the game's success in "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" in Rolling Stone magazine on or near Spacewar!'s 10th birthday in 1972. In the New York Times in 2002 on the game's 40th anniversary, John Markoff interviewed the creators of Spacewar in "A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away . . ."

PDP-1 restoration celebrated in Mountain View, 2006. Image courtesy Computer History Museum
PDP-1 restoration celebrated in Mountain View, 2006. Image courtesy Computer History Museum

Edward Fredkin, at one time at BBN which was DEC's first customer for the PDP-1, McCarthy, Russell, Samson, Kotok and Harlan Anderson, and Gordon Bell on tape, met in May 2006 for a panel to celebrate the Computer History Museum's restoration of a PDP-1.

Their presentations show that TX-0 and PDP-1 users wrote some of the earliest application software. Piner wrote Expensive Typewriter which enabled the group to operate the TX-0 and PDP-1 directly. Wagner wrote Expensive Desk Calculator. On a second PDP-1 in the physics department, Daniel L. Murphy wrote the TECO text editor, later used to implement Emacs. Samson wrote TJ-2, an early page layout program, and implemented the War card game. Collaboration on computing waveforms with Dennis on the TX-0 led to Samson writing the Harmony Compiler with which PDP-1 users coded music. Kotok and Samson worked together on T-Square, a drafting program that used a Spacewar! controller to move the cursor.[7] Gross and Kotok built Expensive Tape Recorder.

Early PDP-1 users wrote programming software including an assembler translated from the TX-0 over one weekend in 1961.[7] Kotok wrote the DDT online debugging program translated from the FLIT debugger for the TX-0.[12] Kotok later wrote an interpreter for the Lisp programming language in TECO macros.[7]

In 1961 Kotok began at DEC writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4.[2] He next worked on the PDP-5 instruction set.[2] Part of a team led by principal architect Gordon Bell under Anderson who was vice president of engineering, Kotok was an assistant logic designer of the first commercial time-sharing computer, the PDP-6.[22] Beginning with the PDP-6, designed and delivered in 1963-1964 for scientific use, DEC machines had a 36-bit word length to accommodate artificial intelligence work in Lisp and to compare with IBM mainframe computers.[23]

In what may have been the first around-the-world networking connection, a PDP-6 at the University of Western Australia in Perth was operated from Boston in the United States via a telex link in 1965. DEC photographed Bell and Kotok at a PDP-6.

Kotok became the principal architect and designer of several generations of the PDP-10, DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20.[5] Bell, Thomas Hastings, Richard Hill and Kotok wrote that the DECSystem-10 accelerated the transition from batch processing to time-sharing and single-user systems.[24]

Kotok was also system architect of the VAX 8600, known as Venus.[5] Up to 4.2 times faster than the standard at the time, the VAX 8600 was the highest performance computer system in DEC history when it was introduced in 1984.[25]

In his 34 year career at DEC, Kotok held senior engineering positions in storage, telecommunications and software. As technical director of the Corporate Strategy Group, Kotok was instrumental in creating the Internet Business Group which advocated early adoption and integration of Internet and Web-based technologies.[26]

DEC brought forth the AltaVista search engine, the Internet firewall, the Web portal, the Webcast and live election returns.[27][28] Through difficult times, DEC continued its lead in developing for the Internet and Web. But Kotok sought a direction different from the corporate strategy of the time that he felt consumed Web and Internet resources to sell DEC products like the Alpha server.[29] For one example, he saw a missed opportunity in Millicent, the micropayment system that could buy and sell Web content for fractions of a U.S. cent.[30]

Kotok was a corporate consulting engineer for DEC 1962–1997, W3C Advisory Committee representative for DEC 1994-1996, vice president of marketing for GC Tech Inc. 1996–1997, member of the Science Advisory Board for Cylink Corp., a consultant for Compaq, and a content advisor for the Computer History Museum.[5][31]

At Berlekamp's suggestion, for nine months during the 1975-1976 academic year Kotok taught logic design at the University of California, Berkeley.[2]

Kotok earned a master's degree in business administration from Clark University in 1978.[32]

DEC 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. Kotok coordinated a BoF on Selection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases on April 7, 1997 at WWW6 in Santa Clara, California.[33] In La Jolla, California, he presented Micropayment Systems to the Electronic Payments Forum in 1997.[34]

Kotok at CSAIL in 2006. Photo: Ralph R. Swick
Kotok at CSAIL in 2006. Photo: Ralph R. Swick

While at DEC Kotok recognized the Web's potential, and went on to help found the World Wide Web Consortium. Early in 1994 in Zürich, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee had met with Michael Dertouzos to discuss starting a new organization at MIT.[35] In April 1994, Kotok, Steve Fink, Gail Grant and Brian Reid from DEC travelled to CERN in Geneva to speak with Berners-Lee about the need for a consortium to create open standards and to coordinate Web development. Berners-Lee mentions the pivotal meeting with DEC in Weaving the Web.[36]

Kotok joined W3C as associate chairman in May 1997.[32]

Kotok served on the committee that helped MIT build the Stata Center designed by Gehry Partners, LLP. One W3C host site is in the Gates tower (virtual tour).
Kotok served on the committee that helped MIT build the Stata Center designed by Gehry Partners, LLP. One W3C host site is in the Gates tower (virtual tour).

Kotok recruited hundreds of W3C members and represented their interests.[2][32] He managed the W3C host site at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) where he was a research scientist.[32] He headed the worldwide W3C Systems and Web Team who serve the millions of pages and resources in the W3C Web site and its mailing list archives.[26]

Kotok managed contractual relations with W3C hosts, member organizations and offices.[26] He helped to establish new W3C offices in India and China. He worked with the W3C management team, the W3C Advisory Board and an internal task force to reduce membership fees in developing countries. Kotok chaired Patent Advisory Groups including one for HTML[37] and was a major contributor to the W3C Patent Policy.[38]

Kotok briefly led the Technology and Society domain which at the time consisted of W3C activity on digital signatures, electronic commerce, public policy, PICS, RDF metadata, privacy, and security.[39]

Kotok lived in the United States in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cape May, New Jersey with his wife Judith Kotok who was a choir director and piano teacher. They were fond of 16th and 17th century music and pipe organs. The Kotoks photographed their tour of historic organs in Germany in 2004. At the time of her death in 2005, Judie Kotok was on the faculty of the Longy School of Music and directed the annual Youth Choir Week held in Cape May by the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey. Judie Kotok co-founded Tech Squares at MIT in 1967. Kotok had a daughter, Leah Kotok, a stepdaughter, Frederica Beck, and a stepson, Daryl Beck.[40][3]

Kotok died of an apparent heart attack on 26 May 2006. He passed away at home in Cambridge.[3]

  1. ^ Levy, Steven (Updated 2 January 2001). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin (Non-Classics). ISBN 0-1410-0051-1. 
  2. ^ a b c d e f Kotok, Alan (15 November 2004). "Oral History of Alan Kotok". Computer History Museum. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  3. ^ a b c Marquard, Bryan. "Alan Kotok; he tred vanguard of computers with brilliance, wit", The Boston Globe, The New York Times Company, 6 June 2006. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  4. ^ Markoff, John. "Alan Kotok, 64, a Pioneer In Computer Video Games", The New York Times, 3 June 2006. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  5. ^ a b c d W3C Folio (1999). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  6. ^ Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, available at Project Gutenberg.
  7. ^ a b c d e Kotok, Alan. (2006). The Mouse That Roared: PDP-1 Celebration Event Lecture 05.15.06 [Google Video]. Mountain View, CA, USA: Computer History Museum. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.. Kotok begins at 0:53:50.
  8. ^ TX-0 alumni reunion (Spring 1984). The Computer Museum Report, Volume 8. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  9. ^ Olsen, Kenneth H. (15 September 1961). Letter to Professor Peter Elias. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  10. ^ Kotok, Alan (undated, XHTML 3 December 2004). MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 41. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  11. ^ . "A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  12. ^ a b W3C mailing list archive for public-memoria@w3.org. W3C (2006). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  13. ^ Abramson, Bruce (June 1989). "Control Strategies for Two-Player Games". ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 21, No. 2. Retrieved on 2006-07-02. 
  14. ^ Greenblatt, Richard D. (12 January 2005). "Oral History of Richard Greenblatt". Computer History Museum. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  15. ^ Berliner, Hans (7 March 2005). "Oral History of Hans Berliner". Computer History Museum. Retrieved on 2006-07-02.
  16. ^ McCarthy, John. (8 September 2005). The History of Computer Chess: An AI Perspective [Google Video]. Mountain View, CA, USA: Computer History Museum. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.. McCarthy begins at 0:43:48.
  17. ^ Brudno, Michael (May 2000). "Competitions, Controversies, and Computer Chess" (PDF). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  18. ^ a b Graetz, J. Martin (August 1981, Spring 1983). The origin of Spacewar!. Creative Computing and Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  19. ^ Digital Equipment Corporation (31 December 1962). Sine-cosine Routine. Retrieved on 2006-07-20.
  20. ^ Haas, Hugo (4 June 2006). Goodbye, Alan. W3C public-memoria@w3.org archive. Retrieved on 2006-12-27.
  21. ^ Gerasimov, Vadim (August 2006). Vadim Gerasimov - Projects. Retrieved on 2006-09-29.
  22. ^ Budne, Phil (undated). Phil's PDP10 Miscellany Page. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  23. ^ Twenty Years of 36-bit Computing with Digital 1964-1984 (1984). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  24. ^ Bell, C. Gordon, Kotok, Alan, Hastings, Thomas N., and Hill, Richard (January 1978). "The evolution of the DECsystem 10". ACM. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  25. ^ VAX 8600: 1984. DEC Timeline (undated). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  26. ^ a b c Kotok, Alan (undated). W3C Alumni. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  27. ^ Internet/Intranet: 1977-1997. DEC Timeline (undated). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  28. ^ Stuart, Anne (June 1995). Digital Rewired. WebMaster Magazine. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  29. ^ Kotok, Alan (29 August 2000). DEC Internet Business Group page. Richard Seltzer, B&R Samizdat Express. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  30. ^ Millicent: 1997. DEC Timeline (undated). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  31. ^ Computer History Museum (undated). Exhibition Credits. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  32. ^ a b c d . "Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Summary Sheet". Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  33. ^ Khare, Rohit (1999). "W3C at WWW6". W3C. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  34. ^ Meeting Report. Electronic Payments Forum (January 1997). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  35. ^ Berners-Lee, Tim (1 December 2004). How It All Started. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  36. ^ Berners-Lee, Tim & Mark Fischetti (1999), Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web, HarperCollins [link accessed 2006-07-01]
  37. ^ W3C (23 September 2003 to 22 March 2004). HTML Patent Advisory Group (PAG) Public Home Page. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  38. ^ W3C (20 May 2003 to 5 February 2004). W3C Patent Policy. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  39. ^ Kotok, Alan (April 1998). Technology and Society. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
  40. ^ Kotok Family Home Page (undated). Retrieved on 2006-07-01.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Persondata
NAME Alan Kotok
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 9 November 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
DATE OF DEATH 26 May 2006
PLACE OF DEATH Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../a/l/a/Alan_Kotok_4069.html"
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