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Birth
Alan Kotok was born on November 9th, 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alan enrolled at the MIT, where he earned his Bachelor's and Master's degree in electrical engineering. -
First Programming Class
In the Spring of 1959, Alan enrolled into the first programming class offered at MIT. The class was taught by the well-known John McCarthy. -
IBM 704
With several of his MIT classmates, Kotok began developing McCarthy's IBM 704 Chess playing program. -
PDP-1
In September of 1961, DEC created the second PDP-1 and was given to the Research Laboratory of Electronics(RLE) at 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 -
Spacewar!
Created the first controllers for the PDP-1 that allowed two people to play Spacewar! side by side.
Spacewar! 1962 -
DEC Debugging Tape (DDT)
In 1962, Kotok wrote the DDT program.
DDT -
Digital Equipment Corporation
Kotok joined DEC, which cemented the rest of his career in computer programming. -
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. -
Clark University
Kotok received an M.B.A from Clark University -
Science Advisory Board for Cylink Corp.
Became a member of the Science Advisory Board for Cylink Corp. -
Compaq
Became a consultant for Compaq -
Retirement from DEC
After a long 34 year career at DEC, Kotok retired from the company. -
GC Tech Inc.
Kotok became Vice president of marketing for GC Tech Inc. -
World Wide Web Consortium
Kotok joined W3C, where he became associate chairman. -
Birds of a feather meeting
Kotok coordinated a birds of a feather meeting on Selection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases. -
Death
Kotok passed away on May 26, 2006
