Lester Donald Earnest (born December 17, 1930) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

Education and career

After receiving his B.S. in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

(Caltech) in 1953, he began his career as a

computer programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

in 1954 during a stint as a

U.S. Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage o ...

Aviation Electronics Officer & Digital Computer Project Officer at the Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Johnsville, Pennsylvania.Biography of Les Earnest
In 1956, he joined the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

(MIT)'s

Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and d ...

to help design the

Semi-Automatic Ground Environment The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was a system of large computers and associated networking equipment that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area. SA ...

(SAGE) air defense system. In 1959, the focus of his career shifted to innovations within the field of word processing. During this time, he was responsible for developing the "first pen-based computer system that reliably recognized cursive writing"Testimony on Software Patents by Les Earnest
/ref> and the first spell checker. From 1959 to 1965, he was a subdepartment head at the MITRE Corporation in

Bedford, Massachusetts Bedford is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population of Bedford was 14,383 at the time of the 2020 United States Census. History ''The following compilation comes from Ellen Abrams (1999) based on information ...

and

Arlington, Virginia Arlington County is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The county is situated in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from the District of Columbia, of which it was once a part. The county ...

. While at MITRE, he received an

M.S. A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

in electrical engineering from MIT in 1960. In 1965, Earnest became a lecturer in computer science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

and the chief administrative officer of the

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center ...

(SAIL). Under founding director John McCarthy, he became involved with the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (

ARPAnet The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

) startup committee. This association would lead him to the one innovation he has received the most acclaim for: the invention of the

Finger protocol In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information. Name/Finger protocol The Name/Finger protocol is based on Req ...

() in the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, Earnest continued to diversify the types of technologies he involved himself with. He made significant contributions in the fields of robotics through the creation of systems that coupled

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human ...

with prosthetic and vehicular applications. Following SAIL's merger with the University's computer science department in 1980, Earnest left Stanford to serve as the founding president and director of Imagen Corp. in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...

. He returned to Stanford's computer science department in 1985 as a lecturer and associate department chair before retiring as senior research computer scientist emeritus in 1988. Accomplishments in computing aside, Earnest is also a long-time bicycle enthusiast. He has served as director and/or officer in several prominent cycling associations including the U.S. Cycling Federation, th
U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame
and th
Federation of Independent Associations for Cycling

References

External links

Les Earnest's Homepage at Stanford

RFC 742 - Name/Finger protocol

Cold War Radar System a Trillion Dollar Fraud – Lester Ernest on RAI (1/4)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Earnest, Les American computer scientists Stanford University staff 1930 births Living people California Institute of Technology alumni People from San Diego