Alan Kotok

Alan Kotok (November 9, 1941 – May 26, 2006) was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital, or DEC) and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first true hackers.

Kotok was a precocious child who skipped two grades before college.

At MIT, he became a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club, and after enrolling in MIT's first freshman programming class, he helped develop some of the earliest computer software including a digital audio program and what is sometimes called the first video game (Spacewar!).

Together with his teacher John McCarthy and other classmates, he was part of the team that wrote the Kotok-McCarthy program which took part in the first chess match between computers.

After leaving MIT, Kotok joined the computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he worked for over 30 years.

He was the chief architect of the PDP-10 family of computers, and created the company's Internet Business Group, responsible for several forms of Web-based technology including the first popular search engine.

Kotok is known for his contributions to the Internet and to the World Wide Web through his work at the World Wide Web Consortium, which he and Digital had helped to found, and where he served as associate chairman.

Alan Kotok was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was raised as an only child in Vineland, New Jersey.

During his childhood, he played with tools in his father's hardware store and learned model railroading.

He was a precocious child, skipping two grades at high school, and he matriculated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of 16 in the fall of 1958 and an MBA from Clark University in 1978.

Although his interest in computers began at Vineland High School, his first practical experience of computing came at MIT; there he developed a habit of working late at night when more computer time was available.

He was influenced by teachers such as Jack Dennis and John McCarthy and by his involvement in the student-organized Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), which he joined soon after starting college in 1958.

While a graduate student and member of TMRC, Dennis introduced his students to the TX-0 on loan to MIT indefinitely from Lincoln Laboratory.

In the spring of 1959, McCarthy taught the first course in programming that MIT offered to freshmen.

Outside classes, Kotok, David Gross, Peter Samson, Robert A. Saunders and Robert A. Wagner, all friends from TMRC, reserved time on the TX-0.

They were able to use the TX-0 as a personal, single-user tool rather than a batch processing system, thanks to Dennis, faculty advisors and John McKenzie, the operations manager.

With classmates Elwyn Berlekamp, Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Wagner, Kotok began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program in 1959.

Kotok described their work in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 41.

The Kotok-McCarthy chess program at MIT would also become Kotok's S.B. thesis.

In September 1961, Digital donated a PDP-1 to MIT.

Although not an expensive machine, and with a tiny (by today's standards) 9K of memory, it had a Type 30 precision CRT display.

Dennis oversaw the PDP-1 lab, located next door to the TX-0.

Students from TMRC worked as support staff, programming the new computer.

"The chess group" graduated in 1962 and at that point their program was able to play chess "comparable to an amateur with about 100 games experience" on an IBM 7090.

They came to learn a great deal about chess, but neither Kotok nor McCarthy were known as chess players.

Mikhail Botvinnik, three times world chess champion, wrote in his book Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning that the Kotok–McCarthy program's "rule for rejecting moves was so constituted that the machine threw the baby out with the bath water."

In 1977, at age 36, Kotok married Judith McCoy, a choir director and piano teacher on the faculty of the Longy School of Music.

They lived in Harvard, Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cape May, New Jersey.

Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum in 2004.

The program drew criticism from Richard Greenblatt, who later wrote Mac Hack, which beat a person in tournament play, and more recently, from Hans Berliner, when he looked back on it in 2005.

During the Cold War, Kotok-McCarthy played (and lost to) the best Russian chess program in the first match between computer programs.

Kotok contributed to one of the earliest interactive computer games, Spacewar!, and is sometimes called the first video game.

Kotok did not write any of the Spacewar! code, but he did travel to Digital to obtain a sine-cosine routine that Russell needed.

Graetz credited Kotok and Saunders with building the game controllers that allowed two people to play side by side.

He died at his home in Cambridge, apparently from a heart attack, on May 26, 2006, seven months after the death of his wife during her treatment for cancer.

He is survived by two daughters, a son, and two grandsons.

At MIT, Kotok earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering.

The couple shared a love of 16th and 17th-century music and pipe organs, and toured historic pipe organs in Sweden, Germany, Italy and Mexico.

They had a daughter, Leah Kotok, and two stepchildren from Judith's prior marriage, Frederica and Daryl Beck.