Douglas McIlroy

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Douglas McIlroy in 2011

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (* 1932 ) (usually called Doug McIlroy ) is an American computer scientist , mathematician , engineer and programmer . He worked at Bell Laboratories and is known for the development of PIPES and filter architecture of Unix and of several Unix commands . His widely acclaimed work on software component development makes him a pioneer of component-based software design and software product design.

biography

He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in engineering physics in 1954 and received his Doctor of Philosophy in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959. From 1954 to 1958, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He then took up a position at Bell Laboratories and was head of the Computing Techniques Research Department by Bell from 1965 to 1986. As part of the work in this department, the foundations and essential parts of the Unix operating system were created. McIlroy himself developed the Unix commands contained in most Unix distributions such as echo, spell, diff , sort, join, graph, speak, tr, tsort, calendar or tee, the pipes and filter architecture of Unix and everything else Software assembly concept.

From 1967 to 1968 McIlroy also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Oxford . McIlroy left Bell Labs in 1997 to accept a professorship in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College .

Honors and memberships

McIlroy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering , to which he was appointed in 2006, and received both the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") and the USENIX Software Tools Award in 2004. He worked as editor of the specialist publications Communications of the ACM , Journal of the ACM , and ACM Transactions on Programming Languages ​​and Systems . In the 1970s he also chaired the awards committee for the Turing Award and was a member of the executive committee of CSNET .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Malcolm Douglas McIlroy: Mass produced software components. (PDF) In: Software Engineering: Report of a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Garmisch, Germany, 7-11 Oct. 1968. Scientific Affairs Division, NATO, January 1969, p. 79 , accessed October 10, 2014 .
  2. ↑ USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") - accessed September 28, 2014
personal data
SURNAME McIlroy, Douglas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McIlroy, Malcom Douglas; McIlroy, Doug
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 1932