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Alan Kotok was born
Alan Kotok was born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -
Developed IBM 704 chess-playing program
Kotok began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program. Kotok described their work in MIT Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 41 and in his bachelor's thesis. -
Helped create the first ever video game known as Spacewar!
Kotok was credited with building the game controllers that allowed two people to play side by side -
Kotok becomes the student staff programmer at MIT
In September of 1961, DEC donated the second PDP-1 it had produced to MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE). Kotok became student staff programmer shortly thereafter. -
He began writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4
before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set -
Kotok joined MIT
Kotok entered MIT at age 16 -
Taught logic design at UCB
he taught logic design at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1975–1976 academic year -
Earned his masters degree
earned a master's degree in business administration from Clark University in 1978, which prepared him for later work at Digital and W3C. -
Helped create the VAX 8600
With Kotok as system architect, the VAX 8600 (known as Venus) was introduced as the highest-performance computer in Digital's history to date, operating up to 4.2 times faster than the standard at the time. -
Founded the World Wide Web Consortium
Kotok recognized the Web's potential, and helped to found the World Wide Web Consortium -
Kotok was vice president of marketing for GC Tech Inc
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Alan Kotok retired from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the fall of 1996 after a 34-year career.
Alan Kotok retired from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the fall of 1996 after a 34-year career. -
Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum
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Kotok passed away
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Celebrated the computer history museums resortation of a PDP-1
Edward Fredkin, at one time at BBN Technologies , McCarthy, Russell, Samson, Kotok and Harlan Anderson met in May 2006 for a panel to celebrate the Computer History Museum's restoration of a PDP-1. Their presentations illustrated the contributions of TX-0 and PDP-1 users to early software.
