Jim Waldo is an American computer scientist and the Chief Technology Officer of

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. He is the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at the

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is the engineering school within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, offering degrees in engineering and applied sciences to graduate students admitted ...

and Professor of Technology and Policy at the

Harvard Kennedy School The John F. Kennedy School of Government, commonly referred to as Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), is the school of public policy of Harvard University, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard Kennedy School offers master's de ...

. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at

Sun Microsystems Laboratories Oracle Labs (formerly Sun Microsystems Laboratories, or Sun Labs) is a research and development branch of Oracle Corporation. The labs were created when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Sun Labs was established in 1990 by Ivan Sutherland and Rober ...

, where he was lead architect for

Jini Jini (), also called Apache River, is a network architecture for the construction of distributed systems in the form of modular co-operating services. JavaSpaces is a part of the Jini. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems, Jini was released ...

, a distributed programming system based on Java, and helped develop Project Darkstar. He was also involved in some of the early design and development of the

Java programming language Java is a high-level, general-purpose, memory-safe, object-oriented programming language. It is intended to let programmers ''write once, run anywhere'' ( WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Jav ...

and environment.

Biography

Jim Waldo graduated from the

University of Utah The University of Utah (the U, U of U, or simply Utah) is a public university, public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret (Book of Mormon), Deseret by the General A ...

in 1973 with a BS in philosophy, in 1975 with an MA in linguistics, and in 1976 with an MA in philosophy. He then attended the

University of Massachusetts at Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a Public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the Flagship university, flagship campus of the Univer ...

for his PhD in philosophy and graduated in 1980. After a year-long academic position at

Hampshire College Hampshire College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was opened in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education, in association with four other colleges ...

, he joined a

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses tha ...

as a programmer. He moved to

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc. was an American technology corporation headquartered and founded in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1980 by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others. Apollo Computer developed and produced Apoll ...

in 1985 and stayed on when it was acquired by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

in 1989. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first object request broker and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first

CORBA The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sy ...

specification. He then moved to

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 ...

in 1992. He left Sun in 2010 and after a year at VMWare, he joined Harvard University where he was named CTO in 2011.

Bibliography

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Waldo, Jim Living people American computer programmers University of Utah alumni University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts alumni Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty American computer scientists Sun Microsystems people Researchers in distributed computing Computer science writers Year of birth missing (living people) Harvard Kennedy School faculty