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Jack Dennis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jack Bonnell Dennis is an American electrical engineer and a computer scientist.
Dennis entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1949 as an electrical engineering major; he received his M.S. degree in 1954, and continued doctoral research and received his Sc.D. in 1958. He became a full professor in 1969.
He was involved in early work on time-sharing through the PDP-1 which his group owned at MIT; that machine is famous in computer science as the machine on which hacker culture started. He shepherded the MIT Model Railroad Club.
Later, he was one of the founding members of the Multics project, to which he contributed one of its most important concepts, the single-level memory. Multics, though not particularly commercially successful in itself, was an inspiration for Ken Thompson to develop Unix.
The latter part of his career was devoted to non-von Neumann models of computation, architecture, and languages. He wanted to free programs from the concept of a program counter. So adopting the concept of "single-assignment," he along with his students and others developed data flow concepts which executed instructions as soon as data became available (this specific model came to be called "static" in contrast to Arvind's later "dynamic").
He retired from MIT in 1987 to do independent projects and consulting. He developed the VAL static data-flow language which in turn inspired the compiler for the SISAL programming language and was a visiting scientist at NASA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS). In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He has a fondness for tea, instead of coffee.
