Malcolm McIlroy
Updated: 05/02/2021 by Computer Hope
Name: Malcolm (Doug) Douglas McIlroy
Born: 1932
Computer-related contributions
- Mathematician, engineer, and programmer known for Unix pipelines, software componentry, and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak and tr.
- Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College.
- Pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product-line engineering.
- Joined Bell Laboratories in 1958. From 1965-1986, he was head of the Computing Techniques Research Department, where the Unix operating system was first developed.
Honors and awards
- Won both the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") and its Software Tools award.
- Served as national lecturer for ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
- Turing Award chairman.
- Associate editor for the Communications of the ACM.
- Member of executive committee of CSNET.
- Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs.
Quotes
"The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code."
"As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow."