 |
Jerome H. Saltzer | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 9, 1939 |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Multics, Project Athena, MIT License |
| Awards | 2010 Computer System Security Award of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Traffic control in a multiplexed computer system (1966) |
| Doctoral advisor | Fernando J. Corbató |
| Doctoral students | |
| Website | web |
Jerome Howard "Jerry" Saltzer (born October 9, 1939) is an American computer scientist. [2]
Jerry Saltzer received an ScD in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1966. His dissertation 'Traffic Control in a Multiplexed System' was advised by Fernando Corbató. [3] In 1966, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
One of Saltzer's earliest involvements with computers was with MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System in the early 1960s. In the later 1960s and early 1970s, he was one of the team leaders of the Multics operating system project. Multics, though not particularly commercially successful in itself, has had a major impact on all subsequent operating systems; in particular, it was an inspiration for Ken Thompson to develop Unix. Saltzer's contributions to Multics included the now-standard kernel stack switching method of process switching, as well as oft-cited work on the security architecture for shared information systems. [4]
Saltzer led the Computer Systems Research group of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Computer Systems Research group was one of the key players in the development of the Internet and ring network technology for local area networks. During this time, Saltzer patented the Proteon ProNet ring network. Another contribution in that area was the end-to-end principle in systems design (Saltzer and Schroeder's design principles), which is one of the important underlying principles that governs the operation of the Internet.
From 1984 to 1988 Saltzer served as Technical Director of MIT's Project Athena. "Saltzer@mit.edu" is one of the few Athena usernames with a capital letter, and legend has it that several special case hacks were required to support this functionality. In September 1995 Saltzer retired from his full-time faculty position, but continued writing and teaching part-time at MIT. [2]
Saltzer is known to all (colleagues, students, friends and family) as "Jerry". In 1961 he married Marlys Anne Hughes. They have two children: Rebecca (born 1962) and Sarah (born 1963). He has two grandchildren: Hannah (born 1997), and Caroline (born 1999). [5]
Saltzer is also very interested in 19th century landscape art of the western United States; he has prepared the catalogue raisonné of the paintings of the painter Frederick Ferdinand Schafer (de). [6] [7] [8] [9]
Saltzer has been the programmer, a designer, or the inspiration, for a number of important pieces of systems software, which are either still in use or have descendants still being used today:
As Technical Director of Project Athena, he supported development of the X Window System, an open-source windowing system, still used and developed on Unix-like systems.
The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Internet Protocol (IP). Early versions of this networking model were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.
Multics is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory. Nathan Gregory writes that Multics "has influenced all modern operating systems since, from microcomputers to mainframes."
The GE 645 mainframe computer was a development of the GE 635 for use in the Multics project. This was the first computer that implemented a configurable hardware protected memory system. It was designed to satisfy the requirements of Project MAC to develop a platform that would host their proposed next generation time-sharing operating system (Multics) and to meet the requirements of a theorized computer utility. The system was the first truly symmetric multiprocessing machine to use virtual memory, it was also among the first machines to implement what is now known as a translation lookaside buffer, the foundational patent for which was granted to John Couleur and Edward Glaser.
TYPSET is an early document editor that was used with the 1964-released RUNOFF program, one of the earliest text formatting programs to see significant use.
roff is a typesetting markup language. As the first Unix text-formatting computer program, it is a predecessor of the nroff and troff document processing systems.
This article presents a timeline of events in the history of computer operating systems from 1951 to the current day. For a narrative explaining the overall developments, see the History of operating systems.
The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was the first general purpose time-sharing operating system. Compatible Time Sharing referred to time sharing which was compatible with batch processing; it could offer both time sharing and batch processing concurrently.
Fernando José "Corby" Corbató was an American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. As of 2023, Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.
Stratus VOS is a proprietary operating system running on Stratus Technologies fault-tolerant computer systems. VOS is available on Stratus's ftServer and Continuum platforms. VOS customers use it to support high-volume transaction processing applications which require continuous availability. VOS is notable for being one of the few operating systems which run on fully lockstepped hardware.
FTP Software, Inc., was an American software company incorporated in 1986 by James van Bokkelen, John Romkey, Nancy Connor, Roxanne van Bokkelen, Dave Bridgham, and several other founding shareholders, who met at Toscanini's in Central Square after an email went out over the Bandykin mailing list looking for people interested in starting a company. Their main product was PC/TCP, a full-featured, standards-compliant TCP/IP package for DOS. The company was based in Andover, Massachusetts. It also had a number of offices throughout the United States and overseas.
Louis Pouzin is a French computer scientist. He designed a pioneering packet communications network, CYCLADES that was the first to implement the end-to-end principle, which became fundamental to the design of the Internet.
Michael Schroeder is an American computer scientist. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems and operating systems and he is perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham–Schroeder protocol. In 2001 he co-founded the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab and was the assistant managing director until the lab was disbanded in 2014.
Barry Appelman is recognized as being the father of the "buddy list" and AOL instant messenger. Companies had been using crude forms of Instant messaging within their own networks for over forty years, but the idea of presence, i.e. who is logged on at any given time, was non existent. It was not until Appelman, and his colleagues at the Thomas Watson Research Center, first began to write programs on the mainframe system letting each other know when they were actually online, that modern day Instant Messaging was born.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
PC/TCP Packet Driver is a networking API for MS-DOS, PC DOS, and later x86 DOS implementations such as DR-DOS, FreeDOS, etc. It implements the lowest levels of a TCP/IP stack, where the remainder is typically implemented either by terminate-and-stay-resident drivers or as a library linked into an application program. It was invented in 1983 at MIT's Lab for Computer Science, and was commercialized in 1986 by FTP Software.
Edson C. Hendricks, an IBM computer scientist, developed RSCS, fundamental software that powered the world’s largest network prior to the Internet and which directly influenced both Internet development and user acceptance of networking between independently managed organizations. Within IBM, the resulting network later became known as VNET and grew to 4000 nodes. In the academic community, VNET formed the base for BITNET which extended to 500 organizations and 3,000 nodes. VNET was also the networking design underpinning EARN in Europe, and NETNORTH in Canada.
John Romkey is an American computer scientist who along with Donald W. Gillies co-developed MIT PC/IP, the first TCP/IP stack in the industry for MS-DOS on the IBM PC in 1983 while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1986, Romkey founded FTP Software, a commercial TCP/IP stack provider. Romkey authored the first network analyzer, Netwatch, predating the Network General Sniffer. He served on the IAB. With Simon Hackett, Romkey connected the first appliance to the Internet in 1990. Romkey is currently one of the owners of Blue Forest Research, a consulting company.
The Wollongong Group (TWG) was one of the first companies to sell commercial software products based on the Unix operating system. It was founded to market a port of Unix Version 6 developed by researchers at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The company was active in Palo Alto, California from 1980 to 1995.
The desktop computer was the IBM Personal Computer attached to one of several local area networks: Ethernet, PRONET, and an RS-232 asynchronous serial line network. The collection of programs is known as PCIP.
My involvement with PC-IP began when I was a freshman at MIT in 1981, and I needed a job to pay my tuition. I had used the ARPNET a little bit, and there was an advertisement for a job with Dave Clark and Jerry Saltzer at the Lab for Computer Science (LCS). I interviewed for the job and got it. They were working on a research project to see if TCP/IP could run on something as small as an IBM PC.... While I was at Epilogue, we created an Internet Toaster for Interop in 1990.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
