David James Brown (born 1957) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

. He was one of a small group at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

that helped to develop the computer system that later became the foundational technology of

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, and was a co-founder of

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

Education

Brown received his primary and secondary school education in Delmar, New York, and then studied at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

Moore School of Electrical Engineering The Moore School of Electrical Engineering was a school at the University of Pennsylvania. The school was integrated into the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science. The Moore School came into existence as a resul ...

where he received a B.S.E. degree in 1979 and an M.S.E. under advisor Ruzena Bajcsy in 1980. In 1984, Brown was introduced to David Wheeler, who invited him to join the

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 56 faculty members, 45 support staff, 105 research staff, and about 205 researc ...

as a doctoral candidate. In October 1986, he matriculated at St John's College,

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

to pursue a Ph.D. degree. His dissertation introduced the concept of Unified Memory Architecture.David J. Brown
Abstraction of Image and Pixel. The Thistle Display System
Technical Report No. 229, at

, UK, August 1991. This idea has subsequently been widely applied — such as by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

in their processors and platform architecture of the late 1990s and onward.

Career

Brown became a member of the research staff in the Computer Science Department at

in 1981, where he worked on the SUN workstation research project with Andreas Bechtolsheim, prior to the establishment of

.Charlene O'Hanlon
A Conversation with David Brown: The Nondisruptive Theory of Evolution
''

ACM Queue ACM ''Queue'' (stylized ''acmqueue'') is a bimonthly computer magazine, targeted to software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining softwar ...

'', October 10, 2006, . In 1982, Brown was one of the group of the seven technical staff from Stanford (along with Kurt Akeley, Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Mark Hannah, Mark Grossman, and Charles "Herb" Kuta) who joined

Jim Clark James Clark (4 March 1936 – 7 April 1968) was a British racing driver from Scotland, who competed in Formula One from to . Clark won two Formula One World Drivers' Championship titles with Lotus, and—at the time of his death—held the ...

to form

. Brown and Stephen R. Bourne formed the Workstation Systems Engineering group at

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

. Together they built the group responsible for the introduction of the

DECstation The DECstation was a brand of computers used by Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, and refers to three distinct lines of computer systems—the first released in 1978 as a word processing system, and the latter (more widely known) two both ...

line of computer systems. In 1992, Brown joined

. He helped to establish the process used for the company's system software architecture, and then went on to define the application binary interface for

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

, Sun's principal system software product. Later, Brown worked on Solaris's adoption of

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

and practices, and then its technologies for energy-efficient computing. In 1998, Brown was elected to the Council of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

, and in 2003 became a founding editor of the ''

'' magazine, producing several articles through 2010.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, David J. 1957 births Living people University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge American computer scientists Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Silicon Graphics people Digital Equipment Corporation people Sun Microsystems people Solaris people American magazine editors