23 Facts About Brinch Hansen

Per Brinch Hansen was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing.

Per Brinch Hansen was born in Frederiksberg, an enclave surrounded by Copenhagen, Denmark.

In 1966, Brinch Hansen moved to Henning Isaksson's hardware group at Regnecentralen, by then a company with shareholders.

In late 1970, Brinch Hansen moved to Pittsburgh, accepting an invitation from Alan Perlis to visit the department of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University as a research associate, while he wrote the first systematic textbook on operating system principles.

In July 1972, Brinch Hansen joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor of computer science, where he began work on defining a programming language with concurrent processes and monitors.

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Subsequently, Brinch Hansen began writing model operating systems in Concurrent Pascal, to evaluate the language.

In 1976, Brinch Hansen chose University of Southern California for his next post, so that his family could remain in their Altadena home.

In 1978, Brinch Hansen became the first computer scientist awarded the Doctor Technices degree, the highest academic distinction within engineering and technological science in Denmark, for the work documented in The Architecture of Concurrent Programs.

Later in 1978, Brinch Hansen published the Distributed Processes language concept, proposing the use of remote procedure calls to synchronize processes running across a microcomputer network.

Brinch Hansen developed a new concurrent programming language, Edison, for the project.

In 1982, Brinch Hansen moved the Edison system to an IBM Personal Computer, and then published his third book, Programming a Personal Computer.

In 1982, Brinch Hansen was named the first Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science at USC.

In 1984, feeling homesick for Denmark after 14 years abroad, Brinch Hansen left USC and joined the faculty of the University of Copenhagen as a Professor of datalogy.

Brinch Hansen contacted John Reynolds at Syracuse University and in 1987 he joined the faculty as a Distinguished Professor.

Brinch Hansen self-published a 2004 memoir, A Programmer's Story: The Life of a Computer Pioneer, on his website.

Brinch Hansen met his wife Milena on a class trip to Yugoslavia in 1962.

The influence of his work was amplified by his "relentless search for simplicity, " his insistence on clarity, writing and rewriting his papers many times before publishing them, becoming "one of the best explainers in the business, " and his commitment to testing concepts in working systems – Brinch Hansen implemented and distributed working systems for new concepts he developed, noting:.

Brinch Hansen's text, Operating System Principles, was the first comprehensive textbook on operating systems.

Brinch Hansen has an eye for the general principle behind the example, but manages to avoid unnecessary abstraction.

Brinch Hansen did precisely that in The Architecture of Concurrent Programs, leading Roy Maddux and Harlan Mills to declare:.

Brinch Hansen published the first monitor notation, adopting the class concept of Simula 67, and invented a queueing mechanism.

Brinch Hansen created the first implementation of monitors, in Concurrent Pascal.

Later, Brinch Hansen developed two languages extending Hoare's CSP message-passing paradigm with parallel recursion, and showed how to efficiently implement such.