Alan Kotok是世界上首款电子游戏《Spacewar》的开发者之一。
个人简介编辑本段回目录
Alan Kotok (November 9, 1941 – May 26, 2006) was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital, or DEC) and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his fellow classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first true hackers.
Alan KotokKotok was a precocious child who skipped two grades before college. At MIT he became a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club, and after enrolling in MIT's first freshman programming class, he wrote some of the earliest computer software. He helped to develop what is sometimes called the first video game (Spacewar!), and together his teacher John McCarthy and other classmates, he was part of the team that wrote the Kotok-McCarthy program which took part in the first chess match between computers.
After leaving MIT, Kotok joined the computer manufacturer DEC, where he remained for over 30 years. He was the chief architect of the PDP-10 family of computers, and created the company's Internet Business Group, responsible for several forms of Web-based technology. Kotok is known for his contributions to the Internet and to the World Wide Web through his work at the World Wide Web Consortium, which he and Digital helped to found, and where he served as associate chairman.
Alan Kotok was born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was raised as an only child in Vineland, New Jersey.[1][2] During his childhood, he played with tools in his father's hardware store and learned model railroading.[1][2] He was a precocious child, skipping two grades at high school, and he matriculated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) aged 16.[3] Although his interest in computers began while he was at Vineland High School, his first practical experience of computing was at MIT; there he developed a habit of working late at night when more computer time was available.
In 1977, Kotok married Judith McCoy, a choir director and piano teacher on the faculty of the Longy School of Music.[2][4] They lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cape May, New Jersey. The couple shared a love of 16th and 17th-century music and pipe organs, and toured historic pipe organs in Sweden, Germany, Italy and Mexico. They had a daughter, Leah Kotok, and two stepchildren from Judith's prior marriage,[4] Frederica and Daryl Beck.
Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum in 2004.[1] He died at his home in Cambridge, apparently from a heart attack, on May 26, 2006, six months after the death of his wife during her treatment for cancer.
Alan Kotok MIT: 1958–1962
At MIT, Kotok obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering.[6] He was influenced by teachers such as Jack Dennis and John McCarthy and by his involvement in the student-organized Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) which he joined soon after starting college in 1958.
While a graduate student and member of TMRC, Dennis introduced his students to the TX-0 on loan to MIT indefinitely from Lincoln Laboratory. In the spring of 1959, McCarthy taught the first course in programming that MIT offered to freshmen.[7] Outside classes, Kotok, David Gross, Peter Samson, Robert A. Saunders and Robert A. Wagner, all friends from TMRC, reserved time on the TX-0. They were able to use the TX-0 as a personal, single-user tool rather than a batch processing system, thanks to Dennis, faculty advisors and John McKenzie, the operations manager.
In September 1961, Digital donated a PDP-1 to MIT. Although not an expensive machine, and with a tiny (by today's standards) 9K of memory, it had a color Type 30 precision CRT display. Dennis oversaw the PDP-1 lab, located next door to the TX-0. Students from TMRC worked as support staff, programming the new computer.
Alan Kotok等Chess
From A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer known as Kotok-McCarthyKotok, with classmates Elwyn Berlekamp, Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Wagner, began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program in 1959. Kotok described their work in MIT Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 41 and in his bachelor's thesis. By the time "the chess group" graduated in 1962, their program played chess "comparable to an amateur with about 100 games experience" on an IBM 7090.
Although they came to know a great deal about the game, neither Kotok nor McCarthy were known as chess players. Mikhail Botvinnik, three times world chess champion, wrote in his book Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning that the Kotok–McCarthy program's "rule for rejecting moves was so constituted that the machine threw the baby out with the bath water."[13] The program drew criticism from Richard Greenblatt, who later wrote Mac Hack, which beat a person in tournament play,[14] and more recently, from Hans Berliner when he looked back on it in 2005.[15] During the Cold War, Kotok-McCarthy played (and lost to) the best Russian chess program in the first match between computer programs.[16]
Spacewar!
A control box for Spacewar! and T-SquareMartin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne Wiitanen conceived the computer game Spacewar! while working at Harvard University in 1961. Inspired by Marvin Minsky's Three Position Display (which they called the Minskytron), they had the first version running, with help from their MIT classmates Dan Edwards, Kotok, Stephen D. Piner, Samson and Saunders, by early 1962. Coded by Russell, Spacewar! was one of the earliest interactive computer games[17] and is sometimes called the first video game.
Alan Kotok等Kotok did not write any of the Spacewar! code, but he did travel to Digital to obtain a sine-cosine routine that Russell needed. Graetz credited Kotok and Saunders with building the game controllers that allowed two people to play side by side.
Spacewar! has had an enduring legacy. The game's success was celebrated in Rolling Stone for the 10th anniversary of Spacewar! in 1972 in "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums". More recently, the source code has been transcribed into a Spacewar! Java applet,[21] and on the 40th anniversary in 2002, the creators of Spacewar! were interviewed by the New York Times.[18]
Software
Edward Fredkin, at one time at BBN Technologies (BBN) (Digital's first customer for the PDP-1), McCarthy, Russell, Samson, Kotok and Harlan Anderson met in May 2006 for a panel to celebrate the Computer History Museum's restoration of a PDP-1 (with Gordon Bell on tape).[22] Their presentations illustrated the contributions of TX-0 and PDP-1 users to early software.
Piner wrote Expensive Typewriter which enabled the group to operate the TX-0 and PDP-1 directly.
Wagner wrote Expensive Desk Calculator.
On a second PDP-1 in the physics department, Daniel L. Murphy wrote the Text Editor and Corrector (TECO) text editor, later used to implement Emacs.
Samson wrote the type-justifying program known as TJ-2, an early page layout program, and implemented the War card game.
Alan KotokCollaboration on computing waveforms with Dennis on the TX-0 led to Samson writing the Harmony Compiler with which PDP-1 users coded music.
Kotok and Samson worked together on T-Square, a drafting program that used a Spacewar! controller to move the cursor.
Gross and Kotok built the digital audio program Expensive Tape Recorder.
Early PDP-1 users wrote programming software including an assembler translated from the TX-0 over one weekend in 1961.[8] Kotok later wrote an interpreter for the Lisp programming language in TECO macros
Kotok and his classmates are described as the first true hackers in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.
Digital: 1962–1996
After graduating from MIT, Kotok started at Digital Equipment Corporation as one of the company's first few dozen employees; in his 34-year career with the company, he held senior engineering positions in storage, telecommunications and software.
He began in 1962 by writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4, before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set.[1] Under Harlan Anderson (Vice President of Engineering), principal architect Gordon Bell led a team, including Kotok as an assistant logic designer, which developed the first commercial time-sharing computer, the PDP-6, designed and delivered in 1963–1964.[2] Aiming at a scientific market, Digital machines had a 36-bit word length to accommodate artificial intelligence work in Lisp and to compete with IBM mainframe computers.In 1965, in what may have been the first around-the-world networking connection, a PDP-6 at the University of Western Australia in Perth was operated from Boston in the United States via a telex link.
Kotok became the principal architect and designer of several generations of the PDP-10, DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20.[6] Bell, Thomas Hastings, Richard Hill and Kotok wrote that the DECSystem-10 accelerated the transition from batch processing to time-sharing and single-user systems.[27] With Kotok as system architect, the VAX 8600 (known as Venus) was introduced in 1984 as the highest performance computer in Digital's history to date, operating up to 4.2 times faster than the standard at the time.
Alan KotokKotok expanded his areas of expertise from engineering into teaching and business: following a suggestion of Berlekamp, he taught logic design at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1975–1976 academic year; he also obtained a master's degree in business administration from Clark University in 1978,[29] which prepared him for later work at Digital and W3C.
Web: 1994–1997
Tim Berners-Lee announcing the World Wide Web Foundation (W3F) in 2008. He mentions the 1994 meeting with Digital at CERN in his speech.While at Digital, Kotok recognized the Web's potential, and helped to found the World Wide Web Consortium. Early in 1994, in Zürich, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee had met with Michael Dertouzos to discuss starting a new organization at MIT. In April 1994, Kotok, Steve Fink, Gail Grant and Brian Reid from Digital traveled to CERN in Geneva to speak with Berners-Lee about the need for a consortium to create open standards and coordinate Web development. Berners-Lee mentions the pivotal meeting with Digital in his book Weaving the Web.
As technical director of Digital's Corporate Strategy Group, Kotok was instrumental in creating the Internet Business Group which advocated early adoption and integration of Internet and Web-based technologies. Digital created the AltaVista search engine, the Internet firewall, the Web portal, the webcast and live election returns. Digital continued its lead in Internet and Web development through difficult times, but Kotok questioned a corporate strategy that he believed consumed Web and Internet resources to sell Digital products like the AlphaServer. For example, he saw a missed opportunity in Millicent, the micropayment system for buying and selling Web content for fractions of a U.S. cent.
Kotok was a corporate consulting engineer for Digital 1962–1997, W3C Advisory Committee representative for Digital 1994–1996, vice president of marketing for GC Tech Inc. 1996–1997, member of the Science Advisory Board for Cylink Corp., a consultant for Compaq, and a content advisor for the Computer History Museum.
Alan Kotok等Digital and GC Tech were early W3C members and were among the sponsors of the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW4) in 1995 in Boston.[39] Kotok coordinated a birds of a feather meeting on Selection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases on April 7, 1997 at WWW6 in Santa Clara, California. In La Jolla, California, he presented Micropayment Systems to the Electronic Payments Forum in 1997.
W3C: 1997–2006
Kotok at CSAIL in 2006. Photo: Ralph R. SwickKotok joined W3C as associate chairman in May 1997.His role involved managing contractual relations with W3C hosts and member organizations, coordinating the worldwide W3C Systems and Web Team services to millions of pages and resources on the W3C website, and maintaining the W3C host site at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he was a research scientist.
While he was associate chairman, Kotok was a member of the W3C management team,[42] and worked closely with the W3C Advisory Board.[43] He helped to establish a new W3C office in India and worked with an internal task force to reduce membership fees in developing countries.[44] He was a major contributor to the W3C Patent Policy and chaired Patent Advisory Groups, including one for HTML.[45][46] He briefly served as Domain Leader of the Technology and Society Domain which at that time included W3C's activity in digital signatures, electronic commerce, public policy, PICS, RDF metadata, privacy, and security.
SpaceWar编辑本段回目录
SpaceWar是世界上第一款真正意义上、可娱乐性质的电子游戏。它比世界上第一款电子游戏“Tennis for Two”晚4年出现于计算机上。
SpaceWar1962年，时任麻省理工学院的学生Steve Russell和他的几位同学一起设计出了一款双人射击游戏——《Space War》。游戏规则非常简单，它通过阴极射线射电管显示器来显示画面并模拟了一个包含各种星球的宇宙空间。在这个空间里，重力（引力）、加速度、惯性等等物理特性一拥俱全，而玩家可以互相用各种武器击毁对方的太空船，但要避免碰撞星球。
SpaceWar 游戏中，玩家使用一对专用的控制器进行操作，控制飞船左右旋转、可以使用导弹（不受引力影响、射程短、威力小）和激光（会受引力影响发生偏转、射程远、威力大）作为武器，此外还有用于脱逃的超高速空间hyperspace，不过其出现地点和几率都是随机的。
Space War在PDP-1小型机上运行，PDP-1小型机在当时还是一款革命性的小型计算机——拥有当时最为新锐的CRT阴极射线射电管显示器（想想吧，在1962年……）、只需一个人操作、且不需要空调——在那个年代其它的COMPUTER们都是些功耗大、发热量巨大的家伙，若没有空调设备，机房温度可以很轻易的升到50℃以上。PDP-1小型机非常昂贵，只有政府、规模相对较大的大学或企业才会购买，所以当时能够玩上Space War的人非常少。而某种意义上，SpaceWar也是DEC PDP-1小型计算机和其CRT显示器的一个相当好的测试工具, 而DEC也是这样做的：其使用SpaceWar为出厂测试程序并内置于机器内部的存储器来向顾客演示其产品性能。
SpaceWar之后衍生出了各种版本，其中主要有：1971年的SpaceGame星系游戏，同样1971年由Nutting Member制作的ComputerSpace计算机空间，以及1977年由Cinematronics制作的SpaceWars空间战争,其中后者是商业上最成功的，发行了一定数量的零售版本。
目前SpaceWar被广泛作为Linux系统默认提供的演示程序而存在于各个版本的Linux系统中，而它的原开发者之一的Alan Kotok，后来成为了全球互联网协会（World Wide Web Consortium）的副总裁，最后于2006年5月26日、因心脏病突发不幸去世，享年64岁。
Alan Kotok万维网联盟World Wide Web Consortium 副总裁Alan Kotok于2006年5月26日心脏病突发不幸去世，享年64岁。Kotok是世界上首款电子游戏《Spacewar》的开发者之一。
《SpaceWar》是由美国麻省理工学院的学生们于1961年开发的电子游戏软件，运行在DEC公司生产的PDP-1大型机上。这在世界玩具史和世界游戏史上，可谓具有划时代的意义。
同时Kotok也是世界上首款象棋电脑游戏的开发者，1959年还在美国麻省理工学院就读时的Kotok便开始了象棋程序的开发。Kotok的另一贡献就是建立了万维网联盟，并于1997年起担任万维网联盟的副总。
消息：据国外媒体报道，曾经参与开发历史上第一款视频游戏的IT“鼻祖级”人物阿兰·科多克5月26日在美国马萨诸塞州去世，享年六十四岁。
据《纽约时报》报道，科多克的死因是突发性心脏病。
1950年代，阿兰·科多克在麻省理工学院就读。在学校，他参加了兴趣团体“MIT铁路模型俱乐部”。这个兴趣团体后来的关注点逐渐转移到了“新兴”的电子计算机技术上。
科多克在这个俱乐部参与了计算机发展史上第一款视频游戏《太空战争》的开发，这款游戏设计于1962年，最早运行于一台“数字设备公司”的PDP-1计算机。
这款视频游戏十分简单，玩家使用键盘或游戏并控制一艘船的移动，并在合适的时机让小船连续发射鱼雷击中目标。
值得一提的是，“MIT铁路模型俱乐部”的成员成为最早的计算机“黑客”，他们也是这个名词的发明者。尽管“黑客”一词今天带有一些违法的意味，但在早期，这个名词描述一些对计算机硬件或者软件持有浓厚兴趣的人。
大学毕业之后，科多克供职于数字设备公司，他成为PDP-10系列计算机的首席架构师，同时也是该公司的搜索引擎Alta Vista的高级顾问。最近，他还担任了互联网标准组织“W3协会”的副主席。
万维网联盟World Wide Web Consortium 副总裁Alan Kotok于5月26日心脏病突发不幸去世，享年64岁。Kotok是世界上首款电子游戏《Spacewar》的开发者之一。
《SpaceWar》是由美国麻省理工学院的学生们于1961年开发的电子游戏软件，运行在DEC公司生产的PDP-1大型机上。这在世界玩具史和世界游戏史上，可谓具有划时代的意义。
同时Kotok也是世界上首款象棋爱好者的开发者，1959年还在美国麻省理工学院就读时的Kotok便开始了象棋程序的开发。Kotok的另一贡献就是建立了万维网联盟，并于1997年起担任万维网联盟的副总。
简陋但充满人类智慧
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kotok
http://www.57yx.com/tvgamenews/20081112-23027.html
http://games.sina.com.cn/t/n/2006-06-07/1404154256.shtml
