26 Facts About Edward Fredkin

Edward Fredkin was an American computer scientist, physicist and businessman who was an early pioneer of digital physics.

Edward Fredkin's mother was a concert pianist, although she did not perform professionally.

Edward Fredkin's father was a businessman but had lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash and as a result, the family was relatively poor.

Edward Fredkin did various weekend and after-school things to earn money, eventually handling a large newspaper delivery route.

Edward Fredkin did poorly in school because he didn't do homework.

Edward Fredkin graduated from John Marshall High School a semester early so that he could earn money for Caltech tuition and living expenses.

Edward Fredkin worked with a number of companies in the computer field and held academic positions at a number of universities.

Edward Fredkin was a computer programmer, a pilot, an advisor to businesses and governments, and a physicist.

Edward Fredkin's initial focus was physics; however, he became involved with computers in 1956 when he was sent by the Air Force, where he had trained as a jet pilot, to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Edward Fredkin wrote a PDP-1 assembler language called FRAP, and its first operating system.

Edward Fredkin organized and founded the Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society in 1961, and participated in its early projects.

Edward Fredkin invented and designed the first modern interrupt system, which Digital called the "Sequence Break".

Edward Fredkin went on to become a contributor in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Edward Fredkin became publicly traded and Fredkin became a millionaire.

From 1971 to 1974, Edward Fredkin was the Director of Project MAC at MIT.

Edward Fredkin had formal and informal associations with Carnegie Mellon University over several decades.

Edward Fredkin has been a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at CMU, and a visiting scientist at MIT Media Laboratory.

Edward Fredkin served as the founder or CEO of a diverse set of companies, including Information International, Three Rivers Computer Corporation, New England Television Corporation, and The Reliable Water Company.

Edward Fredkin was broadly interested in computation, including hardware and software.

Edward Fredkin was the inventor of the trie data structure, radio transponders for vehicle identification, the concept of computer navigation for automobiles, the Fredkin gate, and the Billiard-Ball Computer Model for reversible computing.

Edward Fredkin has been involved in computer vision, chess, and other areas of Artificial Intelligence research.

Edward Fredkin worked at the intersection of theoretical issues in the physics of computation with computational models of physics.

Edward Fredkin chaired the PDP-1 Restoration Project, which was able to restore and reactivate the Computer History Museum's PDP-1 computer after seven months of work.

Edward Fredkin died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on June 13,2023, at the age of 88.

In 1984, Edward Fredkin was awarded the Carnegie Mellon University Dickson Prize in Science, given annually to the person who has been judged to have made the most progress in a scientific field in the United States during that year.

The section of the book covering Edward Fredkin was excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1988.