Jack Dennis

Updated: 12/30/2019 by Computer Hope
Jack Dennis

Name: Jack B. Dennis

Born: October 13, 1931

Computer-related contributions

  • Computer scientist and retired MIT professor.
  • He was involved in early work on time-sharing through the PDP-1, which his research group owned at MIT. That hardware became famous in computer science history as the machine that started the hacker culture.
  • He also sponsored the MIT student-run Tech Model Railroad Club in its early years, where the hacker culture is said to have taken root before spreading to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.
  • Later, he was one of the founding members of the Multics project that he contributed one of its most important concepts, the single-level memory.
  • Multics, though not particularly commercially successful in itself, was an inspiration for Ken Thompson to develop Unix.

Honors and awards

  • Inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1994).
  • Elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2009).

Related computer pioneers

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