PDP-11
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines; the PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer ever. The PDP-11 included a number of innovative features in its instruction set and additional general-purpose registers that made it much easier to program than earlier models in the series. Additionally, the innovative Unibus system allowed external devices to be interfaced to the system using direct memory access, opening the system to a wide variety of peripherals; the PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years. But the ease of programming of the PDP-11 made it popular for general purpose computing uses as well; the design of the PDP-11 inspired the design of late-1970s microprocessors including the Intel x86 and the Motorola 68000.
Design features of PDP-11 operating systems, as well as other operating systems from Digital Equipment, influenced the design of other operating systems such as CP/M and hence MS-DOS. The first named version of Unix ran on the PDP-11/20 in 1970, it is stated that the C programming language took advantage of several low-level PDP-11–dependent programming features, albeit not by design. An effort to expand the PDP-11 from 16 to 32-bit addressing led to the VAX-11 design, which took part of its name from the PDP-11. In 1963, DEC introduced what is considered to be the first commercial minicomputer in the form of the PDP-5; this was a 12-bit design adapted from the 1962 LINC machine, intended to be used in a lab setting. DEC simplified the LINC system and instruction set, aiming the PDP-5 at smaller settings that did not need the power of their larger 18-bit PDP-4; the PDP-5 was a success selling about 50,000 examples. During this period, the computer market was moving from computer word lengths based on units of 6-bits to units of 8-bits, following the introduction of the 7-bit ASCII standard.
In 1967–68, DEC engineers designed a 16-bit machine, the PDP-X, but management cancelled the project. Several of the engineers from the PDP-X formed Data General; the next year they introduced the 16-bit Data General Nova. The Nova was a major success, selling tens of thousands of units and launching what would become one of DEC's major competitors through the 1970s and 80s. A subsequent effort, code-named "Desk Calculator", looked at a variety of options before choosing what became the 16-bit PDP-11. DEC sold over 170,000 PDP-11s in the 1970s. Manufactured of small-scale transistor–transistor logic, a single-board large scale integration version of the processor was developed in 1975. A two-or-three-chip processor, the J-11 was developed in 1979; the last models of the PDP-11 line were the PDP-11/94 and -11/93 introduced in 1990. The PDP-11 processor architecture has a orthogonal instruction set. For example, instead of instructions such as load and store, the PDP-11 has a move instruction for which either operand can be memory or register.
There are output instructions. More complex instructions such as add can have memory, input, or output as source or destination. Most operands can apply any of eight addressing modes to eight registers; the addressing modes provide register, absolute, relative and indexed addressing, can specify autoincrementation and autodecrementation of a register by one or two. Use of relative addressing lets a machine-language program be position-independent. Early models of the PDP-11 had no dedicated bus for input/output, but only a system bus called the Unibus, as input and output devices were mapped to memory addresses. An input/output device determined the memory addresses to which it would respond, specified its own interrupt vector and interrupt priority; this flexible framework provided by the processor architecture made it unusually easy to invent new bus devices, including devices to control hardware that had not been contemplated when the processor was designed. DEC published the basic Unibus specifications offering prototyping bus interface circuit boards, encouraging customers to develop their own Unibus-compatible hardware.
The Unibus made the PDP-11 suitable for custom peripherals. One of the predecessors of Alcatel-Lucent, the Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company, developed the BTMC DPS-1500 packet-switching network and used PDP-11s in the regional and national network management system, with the Unibus directly connected to the DPS-1500 hardware. Higher-performance members of the PDP-11 family, starting with the PDP-11/45 Unibus and 11/83 Q-bus systems, departed from the single-bus approach. Instead, memory was interfaced by dedicated circuitry and space in the CPU cabinet, while the Unibus continued to be used for I/O only. In the PDP-11/70, this was taken a step further, with the addition of a dedicated interface between disks and tapes and memory, via the Massbus. Although input/output devices continued to be mapped into memory addresses, some additional programming was necessary to set up the added bus interfaces; the PDP-11 supports hardware interrupts at four priority levels. Interrupts are serviced by software service routines, which could specify
Detroit
Detroit is the largest and most populous city in the U. S. state of Michigan, the largest United States city on the United States–Canada border, the seat of Wayne County. The municipality of Detroit had a 2017 estimated population of 673,104, making it the 23rd-most populous city in the United States; the metropolitan area, known as Metro Detroit, is home to 4.3 million people, making it the second-largest in the Midwest after the Chicago metropolitan area. Regarded as a major cultural center, Detroit is known for its contributions to music and as a repository for art and design. Detroit is a major port located on the Detroit River, one of the four major straits that connect the Great Lakes system to the Saint Lawrence Seaway; the Detroit Metropolitan Airport is among the most important hubs in the United States. The City of Detroit anchors the second-largest regional economy in the Midwest, behind Chicago and ahead of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, the 13th-largest in the United States. Detroit and its neighboring Canadian city Windsor are connected through a tunnel and the Ambassador Bridge, the busiest international crossing in North America.
Detroit is best known as the center of the U. S. automobile industry, the "Big Three" auto manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler are all headquartered in Metro Detroit. In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, the future city of Detroit. During the 19th century, it became an important industrial hub at the center of the Great Lakes region. With expansion of the auto industry in the early 20th century, the city and its suburbs experienced rapid growth, by the 1940s, the city had become the fourth-largest in the country. However, due to industrial restructuring, the loss of jobs in the auto industry, rapid suburbanization, Detroit lost considerable population from the late 20th century to the present. Since reaching a peak of 1.85 million at the 1950 census, Detroit's population has declined by more than 60 percent. In 2013, Detroit became the largest U. S. city to file for bankruptcy, which it exited in December 2014, when the city government regained control of Detroit's finances.
Detroit's diverse culture has had both local and international influence in music, with the city giving rise to the genres of Motown and techno, playing an important role in the development of jazz, hip-hop and punk music. The erstwhile rapid growth of Detroit left a globally unique stock of architectural monuments and historic places, since the 2000s conservation efforts managed to save many architectural pieces and allowed several large-scale revitalizations, including the restoration of several historic theatres and entertainment venues, high-rise renovations, new sports stadiums, a riverfront revitalization project. More the population of Downtown Detroit, Midtown Detroit, various other neighborhoods has increased. An popular tourist destination, Detroit receives 19 million visitors per year. In 2015, Detroit was named a "City of Design" by UNESCO, the first U. S. city to receive that designation. Paleo-Indian people inhabited areas near Detroit as early as 11,000 years ago including the culture referred to as the Mound-builders.
In the 17th century, the region was inhabited by Huron, Odawa and Iroquois peoples. The first Europeans did not penetrate into the region and reach the straits of Detroit until French missionaries and traders worked their way around the League of the Iroquois, with whom they were at war, other Iroquoian tribes in the 1630s; the north side of Lake Erie was held by the Huron and Neutral peoples until the 1650s, when the Iroquois pushed both and the Erie people away from the lake and its beaver-rich feeder streams in the Beaver Wars of 1649–1655. By the 1670s, the war-weakened Iroquois laid claim to as far south as the Ohio River valley in northern Kentucky as hunting grounds, had absorbed many other Iroquoian peoples after defeating them in war. For the next hundred years no British, colonist, or French action was contemplated without consultation with, or consideration of the Iroquois' response; when the French and Indian War evicted the Kingdom of France from Canada, it removed one barrier to British colonists migrating west.
British negotiations with the Iroquois would both prove critical and lead to a Crown policy limiting the west of the Alleghenies settlements below the Great Lakes, which gave many American would-be migrants a casus belli for supporting the American Revolution. The 1778 raids and resultant 1779 decisive Sullivan Expedition reopened the Ohio Country to westward emigration, which began immediately, by 1800 white settlers were pouring westwards; the city was named by French colonists, referring to the Detroit River, linking Lake Huron and Lake Erie. On July 24, 1701, the French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, along with more than a hundred other settlers began constructing a small fort on the north bank of the Detroit River. Cadillac would name the settlement Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, after Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, Minister of Marine under Louis XIV. France offered free land to colonists to attract families to Detroit. By 1773, the population of Detroit was 1,400. By 1778, its population was up to 2,144 and it was the third-largest city in the Province of Quebec.
The region's economy was based on the lucrative fur trade, in which nume
Sigma Xi
Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Honor Society is a non-profit honor society for scientists and engineers, founded in 1886 at Cornell University by a junior faculty member and a handful of graduate students. Members elect others on the basis of their research achievements or potential. Sigma Xi has nearly 100,000 members who were elected to membership based on their research achievements and potential, it has more than 500 chapters around the world. In addition to publishing American Scientist magazine, Sigma Xi provides grants annually to promising young researchers and sponsors a variety of programs supporting ethics in research and engineering education, the public understanding of science, international research cooperation and the overall health of the research enterprise; the Society is based in North Carolina. The Greek letters "Sigma" and "Xi" form the acronym of the Society's motto, Σπουδῶν Ξυνῶνες or "Spoudon Xynones," which translates as "Companions in Zealous Research." The word'Honor' was added to the name of the Society at the 2016 Annual Meeting.
According to Sigma Xi President Tee L. Guidotti, "Sigma Xi, of course, is our basic name and has been since the organization was founded in 1886 as the scientific and engineering counterpart to Phi Beta Kappa. Like all “Greek letter” societies, whether professional or social, it is an acronym for the motto of the organization, Σπουδων Ξυνωνες, which translates as "companions in Zealous Research." For many years, we were referred to as “Society of the Sigma Xi.” In the early twentieth century, some in the leadership wanted “Sigma Xi” to be dropped altogether in favor of some formulation such as “Scientific Research Society of America.” In a strange quirk of history, both names survived because the organization split in the 1940s into an academic honor society and an honor society for applied research and engineering. RESA was a separate entity, wholly owned by Sigma Xi, represented engineers and scientists at non-academic institutions, such as government and industrial research laboratories.
In an stranger development, Sigma Xi and RESA merged back together in 1974 and began calling itself Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society." The William Procter Prize is a prestigious scientific research award by the society in the name of a member, William Procter, who also endowed this award in 1950. This award recognizes outstanding contributions to scientific research and the ability to communicate the significance of the research to scientists in other disciplines. More than 200 winners of the Nobel Prize have been Sigma Xi members, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick and James Watson. List of Sigma Xi members Official website American Scientist Sigma Xi's Year of Water H2008 Blog
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is an international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947, is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society; the ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, with nearly 100,000 members as of 2019. Its headquarters are in New York City; the ACM is an umbrella organization for scholarly interests in computer science. Its motto is "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession"; the ACM was founded in 1947 under the name Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, changed the following year to the Association for Computing Machinery. ACM is organized into over 171 local chapters and 37 Special Interest Groups, through which it conducts most of its activities. Additionally, there are over 500 university chapters; the first student chapter was founded in 1961 at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Many of the SIGs, such as SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, SIGCSE and SIGCOMM, sponsor regular conferences, which have become famous as the dominant venue for presenting innovations in certain fields.
The groups publish a large number of specialized journals and newsletters. ACM sponsors other computer science related events such as the worldwide ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, has sponsored some other events such as the chess match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue computer. ACM publishes over 50 journals including the prestigious Journal of the ACM, two general magazines for computer professionals, Communications of the ACM and Queue. Other publications of the ACM include: ACM XRDS "Crossroads", was redesigned in 2010 and is the most popular student computing magazine in the US. ACM Interactions, an interdisciplinary HCI publication focused on the connections between experiences and technology, the third largest ACM publication. ACM Computing Surveys ACM Computers in Entertainment ACM Special Interest Group: Computers and Society A number of journals, specific to subfields of computer science, titled ACM Transactions; some of the more notable transactions include: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics ACM Transactions on Computational Logic ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction ACM Transactions on Database Systems ACM Transactions on Graphics ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing and Applications IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Although Communications no longer publishes primary research, is not considered a prestigious venue, many of the great debates and results in computing history have been published in its pages.
ACM has made all of its publications available to paid subscribers online at its Digital Library and has a Guide to Computing Literature. Individual members additionally have access to Safari Books Online and Books24x7. ACM offers insurance, online courses, other services to its members. In 1997, ACM Press published Wizards and Their Wonders: Portraits in Computing, written by Christopher Morgan, with new photographs by Louis Fabian Bachrach; the book is a collection of historic and current portrait photographs of figures from the computer industry. The ACM Portal is an online service of the ACM, its core are two main sections: the ACM Guide to Computing Literature. The ACM Digital Library is the full-text collection of all articles published by the ACM in its articles and conference proceedings; the Guide is a bibliography in computing with over one million entries. The ACM Digital Library contains a comprehensive archive starting in the 1950s of the organization's journals, magazines and conference proceedings.
Online services include a forum called Tech News digest. There is an extensive underlying bibliographic database containing key works of all genres from all major publishers of computing literature; this secondary database is a rich discovery service known as The ACM Guide to Computing Literature. ACM adopted a hybrid Open Access publishing model in 2013. Authors who do not choose to pay the OA fee must grant ACM publishing rights by either a copyright transfer agreement or a publishing license agreement. ACM was a "green" publisher. Authors may post documents on their own websites and in their institutional repositories with a link back to the ACM Digital Library's permanently maintained Version of Record. All metadata in the Digital Library is open to the world, including abstracts, linked references and citing works and usage statistics, as well as all functionality and services. Other than the free articles, the full-texts are accessed by subscription. There is a mounting challenge to the ACM's publication practices coming from the open access movement.
Some authors see a centralized peer–review process as less relevant and publish on their home pages or on unreviewed sites like arXiv. Other organizations have sprung up which do their peer review free and online, such as Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Machine Learning Research and the Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology. In addition to student and regular members, ACM has several advanced membership grades to recognize those with multiple years of membership and "demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers"; the number of Fellows, Distinguished Members, Senior Members cannot exceed 1%, 10%, 25% of the total number of professional members, respect
Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system, he invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle. Thompson was born in New Orleans; when asked how he learned to program, Thompson stated, "I was always fascinated with logic and in grade school I'd work on arithmetic problems in binary, stuff like that. Just because I was fascinated." Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a Master's degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp.
Thompson was hired by Bell Labs in 1966. In the 1960s at Bell Labs and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language, he created a video game called Space Travel. Bell Labs withdrew from the MULTICS project. In order to go on playing the game, Thompson found an old PDP-7 machine and rewrote Space Travel on it; the tools developed by Thompson became the Unix operating system: Working on a PDP-7, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, including Rudd Canaday, developed a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, some small utility programs. In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix", in a somewhat treacherous pun on the name "Multics". After initial work on Unix, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and created B, a precursor to Ritchie's C. In the 1960s, Thompson began work on regular expressions. Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED, which included regular expressions for searching text.
QED and Thompson's editor ed contributed to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs. All programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson's notation, he invented Thompson's construction algorithm used for converting regular expression into nondeterministic finite automaton in order to make expression matching faster. Throughout the 1970s, Thompson and Ritchie collaborated on the Unix operating system. In a 2011 interview, Thompson stated that the first versions of Unix were written by him, that Ritchie began to advocate for the system and helped to develop it: I did the first of two or three versions of UNIX all alone, and Dennis became an evangelist. There was a rewrite in a higher-level language that would come to be called C, he worked on the language and on the I/O system, I worked on all the rest of the operating system. That was for the PDP-11, serendipitous, because, the computer that took over the academic community.
Feedback from Thompson's Unix development was instrumental in the development of the C programming language. Thompson would say that the C language "grew up with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such, it became perfect for writing systems". In 1975, Thompson went to his alma mater, UC Berkeley. There, he helped to install Version 6 Unix on a PDP-11/70. Unix at Berkeley would become maintained as its own system, known as the Berkeley Software Distribution. Along with Joseph Condon, Thompson created the hardware and software for Belle, a world champion chess computer, he wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, known as endgame tablebases, for all 4, 5, 6-piece endings, allowing chess-playing computer programs to make "perfect" moves once a position stored in them is reached. With the help of chess endgame expert John Roycroft, Thompson distributed his first results on CD-ROM. Throughout the 1980s, Thompson and Ritchie continued revising Research Unix, which adopted a BSD codebase for the 8th, 9th, 10th editions.
In the mid-1980s, work began at Bell Labs on a new operating system as a replacement for Unix. Thompson was instrumental in the design and implementation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a new operating system utilizing principles of Unix, but applying them more broadly to all major system facilities; some programs that were part of versions of Research Unix, such as mk and rc, were incorporated into Plan 9. Thompson tested early versions of the C++ programming language for Bjarne Stroustrup by writing programs in it, but refused to work in C++ due to frequent incompatibilities between versions. In a 2009 interview, Thompson expressed a negative view of C++, stating, "It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive." In 1992, Thompson developed the UTF-8 encoding scheme together with Rob Pike. UTF-8 encoding has since become the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for more than half of all web pages. In the 1990s, work began on the Inferno operating system, another research operating system, based around a portable
Michigan
Michigan is a state in the Great Lakes and Midwestern regions of the United States. The state's name, originates from the Ojibwe word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake". With a population of about 10 million, Michigan is the tenth most populous of the 50 United States, with the 11th most extensive total area, is the largest state by total area east of the Mississippi River, its capital is Lansing, its largest city is Detroit. Metro Detroit is among the nation's largest metropolitan economies. Michigan is the only state to consist of two peninsulas; the Lower Peninsula is noted as shaped like a mitten. The Upper Peninsula is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the Straits of Mackinac, a five-mile channel that joins Lake Huron to Lake Michigan; the Mackinac Bridge connects the peninsulas. The state has the longest freshwater coastline of any political subdivision in the world, being bounded by four of the five Great Lakes, plus Lake Saint Clair; as a result, it is one of the leading U.
S. states for recreational boating. Michigan has 64,980 inland lakes and ponds. A person in the state is never more than six miles from a natural water source or more than 85 miles from a Great Lakes shoreline; the area was first occupied by a succession of Native American tribes over thousands of years. Inhabited by Natives, Métis, French explorers in the 17th century, it was claimed as part of New France colony. After France's defeat in the French and Indian War in 1762, the region came under British rule. Britain ceded this territory to the newly independent United States after Britain's defeat in the American Revolutionary War; the area was part of the larger Northwest Territory until 1800, when western Michigan became part of the Indiana Territory. Michigan Territory was formed in 1805, but some of the northern border with Canada was not agreed upon until after the War of 1812. Michigan was admitted into the Union in 1837 as a free one, it soon became an important center of industry and trade in the Great Lakes region and a popular immigrant destination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Although Michigan developed a diverse economy, it is known as the center of the U. S. automotive industry, which developed as a major economic force in the early 20th century. It is home to the country's three major automobile companies. While sparsely populated, the Upper Peninsula is important for tourism thanks to its abundance of natural resources, while the Lower Peninsula is a center of manufacturing, agriculture and high-tech industry; when the first European explorers arrived, the most populous tribes were Algonquian peoples, which include the Anishinaabe groups of Ojibwe, Odaawaa/Odawa, the Boodewaadamii/Bodéwadmi. The three nations co-existed peacefully as part of a loose confederation called the Council of Three Fires; the Ojibwe, whose numbers are estimated to have been between 25,000 and 35,000, were the largest. The Ojibwe were established in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and northern and central Michigan, inhabited Ontario and southern Manitoba, Canada; the Ottawa lived south of the Straits of Mackinac in northern and southern Michigan, but in southern Ontario, northern Ohio and eastern Wisconsin.
The Potawatomi were in southern and western Michigan, in addition to northern and central Indiana, northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, southern Ontario. Other Algonquian tribes in Michigan, in the south and east, were the Mascouten, the Menominee, the Miami, the Sac, the Fox; the Wyandot were an Iroquoian-speaking people in this area. French voyageurs and coureurs des bois settled in Michigan in the 17th century; the first Europeans to reach what became Michigan were those of Étienne Brûlé's expedition in 1622. The first permanent European settlement was founded in 1668 on the site where Père Jacques Marquette established Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan as a base for Catholic missions. Missionaries in 1671–75 founded outlying stations at Saint Ignace and Marquette. Jesuit missionaries were well received by the area's Indian populations, with few difficulties or hostilities. In 1679, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle built Fort Miami at present-day St. Joseph. In 1691, the French established a trading post and Fort St. Joseph along the St. Joseph River at the present-day city of Niles.
In 1701, French explorer and army officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit or "Fort Pontchartrain on-the-Strait" on the strait, known as the Detroit River, between lakes Saint Clair and Erie. Cadillac had convinced King Louis XIV's chief minister, Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain, that a permanent community there would strengthen French control over the upper Great Lakes and discourage British aspirations; the hundred soldiers and workers who accompanied Cadillac built a fort enclosing one arpent and named it Fort Pontchartrain. Cadillac's wife, Marie Thérèse Guyon, soon moved to Detroit, becoming one of the first European women to settle in what was considered the wilderness of Michigan; the town became a major fur-trading and shipping post. The Église de Saint-Anne was founded the same year. While the original building does not survive, the congregation remains active. Cadillac departed to serve as the French governor of Louisiana from 1710 to 1716.
French attempts to consol
Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed, he authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. Kernighan is coauthor of the AMPL programming languages; the "K" of K&R C and the "K" in AWK both stand for "Kernighan". In collaboration with Shen Lin he devised well-known heuristics for two NP-complete optimization problems: graph partitioning and the travelling salesman problem. In a display of authorial equity, the former is called the Kernighan–Lin algorithm, while the latter is known as the Lin–Kernighan heuristic. Kernighan has been a Professor in the Computer Science Department of Princeton University since 2000, he is the Undergraduate Department Representative. Kernighan was born in Toronto, he attended the University of Toronto between 1960 and 1964, earning his Bachelor's degree in engineering physics.
He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1969 for research supervised by Peter Weiner. Kernighan has held a professorship in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton since 2000; each fall he teaches a course called "Computers in Our World", which introduces the fundamentals of computing to non-majors. Kernighan was the software editor for Prentice Hall International, his "Software Tools" series spread the essence of "C/Unix thinking" with makeovers for BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal, most notably his "Ratfor" was put in the public domain. He has said that if stranded on an island with only one programming language it would have to be C. Kernighan coined the term helped popularize Thompson's Unix philosophy. Kernighan is known as a coiner of the expression "What You See Is All You Get", a sarcastic variant of the original "What You See Is What You Get". Kernighan's term is used to indicate that WYSIWYG systems might throw away information in a document that could be useful in other contexts.
Kernighan's original 1978 implementation of Hello, World! was sold at The Algorithm Auction, the world's first auction of computer algorithms. In 1996, Kernighan taught CS50, the Harvard University introductory course in Computer Science. Other achievements during his career include: Brian Kernighan's home page at Bell Labs "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" — By Brian Kernighan, AT&T Bell Labs, 2 April 1981 "Leap In and Try Things" — Interview with Brian Kernighan — on "Harmony at Work Blog", October 2009. An Interview with Brian Kernighan — By Mihai Budiu, for PC Report Romania, August 2000 "Transcript of an interview with Brian Kernighan". Archived from the original on 2009-04-28. Retrieved 2016-03-31. – Interview by"Michael S. Mahoney". Archived from the original on 2009-05-28. Retrieved 2016-03-31. Video — TechNetCast At Bell Labs: Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan Video — "Assembly for the Class of 2007:'D is for Digital and Why It Matters'" A Descent into Limbo by Brian Kernighan Photos of Brian Kernighan Works by Brian Kernighan at Open Library Video interview with Brian Kernighan for Princeton Startup TV The Setup, Brian Kernighan
