Douglas McIlroy

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy
McIlroy at the Japan Prize Foundation in 2011
Born1932 (age 91–92)
Alma materCornell University (B.S., 1954)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1959)
Scientific career
Fieldscomputer science, mathematics, engineering
ThesisOn the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells (1959)
Websitewww.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is an American mathematician, engineer, and programmer. He is famous for inventing the pipeline used in the UNIX computer operating system,[1] the principles of component-based software engineering [2] and several original UNIX utilities: spell, diff, sort, join, speak, and tr.

Biography

Douglas McIlroy went to school and earned a Bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1954 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959. In 1958, he joined Bell Labs. From 1965 to 1986, he was Head of Computer Research at Bell Labs. The UNIX operating system was invented in Bell Labs.[3] In 1997, McIlroy retired from Bell Labs and went to work as an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth College's Computer Science Department.[4]

References

  1. ↑ Erik Raimond (2003-09-19). "Basics of the Unix Philosophy". Archived from the original on 2010-07-15. Retrieved 2014-09-10.
  2. ↑ Макілрой, Малкольм Дуглас (January 1969). "Mass produced software components" (PDF). Software Engineering: Report of a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Garmisch, Germany, 7-11 Oct. 1968. Scientific Affairs Division, NATO. p. 79. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-05-31. Retrieved 2014-09-10.
  3. ↑ "M. Douglas McIlroy Biography". 2007-03-14. Archived from the original on 2014-09-10. Retrieved 2014-09-10.
  4. ↑ "Douglas McIlroy". HOPL: Online Historical Encyclopaedia of Programming Languages. Archived from the original on 2020-08-03. Retrieved 2020-09-01.