23 Facts About Alan Kotok

Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium.

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

Alan Kotok 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.

Alan 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.

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

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

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

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

Alan Kotok later wrote an interpreter for the Lisp programming language in TECO macros.

Alan Kotok began in 1962 by writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4, before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set.

Alan Kotok became the principal architect and designer of several generations of the PDP-10, DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20.

Bell, Thomas Hastings, Richard Hill and Alan Kotok wrote that the DECSystem-10 accelerated the transition from batch-processing to time-sharing and single-user systems.

Digital continued its lead in Internet and Web development through difficult times, but Alan Kotok questioned a corporate strategy that he believed consumed Web and Internet resources to sell Digital products like the AlphaServer.

Alan Kotok coordinated a birds of a feather meeting on Selection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases on April 7,1997, at WWW6 in Santa Clara, California.

Alan Kotok's role involved managing contractual relations with W3C hosts and member organizations, coordinating the worldwide W3C Systems and Web Team services to millions of pages and resources on the W3C website, and maintaining the W3C host site at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was a research scientist.

Alan Kotok helped to establish a new W3C office in India and worked with an internal task force to reduce membership fees in developing countries.

Alan Kotok was a major contributor to the W3C Patent Policy and chaired Patent Advisory Groups, including one for HTML.

Alan Kotok briefly served as Domain Leader of the Technology and Society Domain which at that time included W3C's activity in digital signatures, electronic commerce, public policy, PICS, RDF metadata, privacy, and security.

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

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

Alan Kotok 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.

Alan Kotok is survived by two daughters, a son, and three grandchildren.