Fernando Corbató

Fernando Corbató (born July 1, 1926, Oakland, California, U.S.—died July 12, 2019, Newburyport, Massachusetts) was an American physicist and computer scientist and winner of the 1990 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “pioneering work organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, CTSS and Multics.”

Corbató received a bachelor’s degree (1950) in physics from the California Institute of Technology and a doctorate (1956) in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After finishing his studies, Corbató joined MIT’s Computation Center (1956–66), and he held a professorship at the school from 1962 until his retirement in 1996, at which time he was the Ford Professor of Engineering.

Corbató was a founding member of Project Mac, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a complete time-sharing system. The project built on the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), software that Corbató had created in 1961 at MIT. Project Mac developed the necessary hardware to implement CTSS. This time-sharing system went online in 1963 and was used at many locations around the world until newer hardware designs arrived in 2000. Corbató’s book The Compatible Time-Sharing System: A Programmer’s Guide (1963) is a classic.

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Corbató was elected to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE; 1975), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975), the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1976), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1982). In addition to the Turing Award, Corbató was honoured with an NEC Corporation Computers and Communications Award, an IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award, an American Federation of Information Processing Societies Harry Goode Memorial Award, and an IEEE Computing Society Computer Pioneer Award.