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Birth
One of the most important men in AI, John McCarthy was born -
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Princeton
Worked at Princeton University as a research instructor. -
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Stanford
Taught at Stanford University. -
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Dartmouth
Taught at Dartmouth University. -
Artificial Intelligence
McCarthy coins the term "artificial intelligence" at a conference. A possible explanation for his train of thought to come up with the term is perhaps his background in cognitive science. -
LISP
John McCarthy developed the high-level programming language LISP. It "pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler" (Wikipedia). It provided way for more and more innovation and the derived data structures from it are widely used, even in today's computer science. This language has been used for over 30 years in AI (Israel 2). -
Vital move to MIT
Switched to MIT and established friendships with John von Neumann and Marvin Lee Minsky causing numerous collaborations at the AI labs of MIT. This melange of extreme personalities gave rise to many interesting collaborations projects at the AI Lab at MIT. (Siesing 1) -
Garbage Collection
John McCarthy invented garbage collection, which is a memory-management concept that is widely used today. The idea of garbage collection is to de-initialize memory so that the program doesn't run out of memory and in this way memory is available to be written on reducing the possibility of writing on existing memory. This feature is one of the key features of Java. -
Versatility of LISP
McCarthy showcased the versatility and universality of the language, specifially its "operational semantics" and a "recursion theoretical analysis" (Israel 3). -
Utility Compting
McCarthy suggested the concept of "utility computing" which was perhaps one of the first motions towards the personal computer. This concept is based on on-demand computer services that way consumers didn't have to pay thousands of dollars to have their own computer and in with time-sharing, these computers would be made more accessible leading to more and more people being attracted to the industry. This concept is alive even today such as Amazon Web Services. -
Time-sharing design proposal and THOR
John McCarthy proposed a working model for time-sharing and came up with THOR, which was a time-sharing system with a display. This was an important advancement in that it made the computer a much more user-friendly device and broadened its applications multifold. This was breaking away from the boring course of action of a "dumb" terminal and was shifting the development of computers in a better direction. -
Project MAC
John McCarthy established Project MAC at MIT using DoD research grants. This project was similar to Stanford's SAIL, but was fundamentally different due to the people it attracted. SAIL attracted easy-going, liberal hippies while Project MAC brought in hardcore engineers. Another key feature was that SAIL was located at the heart of the free speech movement and in a generally more liberal setting which caused its technological advancement to affect the socio-political situation around it. -
Formation
Founded by John McCarthy at Stanford after making the move from Massachusetts. -
Chess Program
McCarthy along with his team developed a chess program. This was an amazing feat because during that period of time, people were skeptic about these "robotic" machines and weren't convinced by its ability to carry out tasks. -
Space Fountain
McCarthy suggested the Space Fountain concept which is a "type of tower extending into space and kept vertical by the outward force of a stream of pellets propelled from Earth along a sort of conveyor belt which returns the pellets to Earth" (Wikipedia). This was one of McCarthy's rather unorthodox projects. -
Move from East Coast to West Coast
McCarthy moved back from MIT back to the West Coast to subsequently establish SAIL. This move indirectly caused a major change in the perspective of computer scientists. His move to the West Coast allowed more and more hackers living the West Coast life style to get involved in the field which brought hippie and liberal ideals into play. This bolstered hacker ethic and distributed MIT's tech powerhouse image over to the West Coast and introduced a relaxed lifestyle. -
ALGOL
John McCarthy helped develop ALGOL(Algorithmic Language) which was one of the first languages along with FORTRAN, LISP and COBOL. This proved to be a crucial step in computing considering how algorithms are the basis for any type of program.
