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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
dan@discuss.systems ("Dan Ports") wrote:
I missed this news earlier, but legendary early OS and computer architecture researcher Jack Dennis died in March.
He was at MIT from 1949 -- before their first computer! -- until retirement and beyond, and did pioneering work on hardware support for time-sharing on the PDP-1 and on the memory and protection architecture of Multics.
Some of the many things he introduced include:
* segmented virtual memory
* capability-based security
* dataflow computation and architectures
* starting the SOSP conference
* probably being the first person to name a variable 'foo' (!)https://news.mit.edu/2026/jack-dennis-pioneering-developer-dataflow-models-of-computation-dies-0410