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Alan Kotok

By marleeloiben

  • Birth

    Alan Kotok was born in Philadelphia and was raised in New Jersey. He was an incredibly bright child and skipped 2 grades. He began playing with his fathers tools and learned about model railroading.

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    At the age of 16 Alan Kotok began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he earned his bachelor degree and master's degrees in electrical engineering.

  • First ever programming course

    First ever programming course
    In spring Kotok takes MIT’s first ever course in programming taught by John McCarthy.

  • McCarthy's BM 704

    McCarthy's BM 704
    Kotok along with a few classmates, began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess playing program

  • Spacewar

    Spacewar
    Kotok contributed to the development of Spacewar! the first video game. He built the game controllers that allowed two people to play side by side.

  • PDP-1

    In September of 1961, the DEC donated the PDP-1 to MIT. Shortly after this, Kotok became apart of the student staff programming team at RLE who re-wrote the code for Ed Fredkin's FRAP assembler for the PDP-1

  • Digital Equipment Corporation

    Kotok started at Digital Equipment Corporation where he began writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4 before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set

  • PDP-6

    PDP-6
    Apart of the team at DEC that designed and developed the PDP-6. Kotok was given the position of assistant logic designer for the project.

  • Taught logic design at UCB

    Taught logic design at UCB
    Kotok taught logic design at the University of California Berkeley during the 1975-1976 academic year.

  • M.B.A

    M.B.A
    Alan Kotok received an M.B.A from Clark University

  • VAX 8600

    VAX 8600
    Kotok helps invent the VAX 8600, which at the time 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

  • World Wide Web Consortium

    Kotok recognized the Web's potential, and helped found the World Wide Web Consortium

  • Retired from DEC

    Kotok retired from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the fall of 1996 after working there for 34 years.

  • Oral History

    Oral History
    Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum

  • Death

    Kotok died at his home in Cambridge from a heart attack on May 26, 2006