Dominic P. Giampaolo is a

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

who helped develop the

Be File System The Be File System (BFS) is the native file system for the BeOS. In the Linux kernel, it is referred to as "BeFS" to avoid confusion with Boot File System. BFS was developed by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon over a ten-month period, st ...

for the Be Operating System (BeOS) and currently works at

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

After graduating from Lewiston High School in

Lewiston, Maine Lewiston (; ) is the List of municipalities in Maine, second most populous city in the U.S. state of Maine, with the city's population at 37,121 as of the 2020 United States census. The city lies halfway between Augusta, Maine, Augusta, the sta ...

in 1987, he started studying political science at

American University The American University (AU or American) is a Private university, private University charter#Federal, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Its main campus spans 90-acres (36 ha) on Ward Circle, in the Spri ...

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, but changed to computer science after one semester. After completing his bachelor's degree, he did a master's degree at

Worcester Polytechnic Institute The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is a Private university, private research university in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1865, WPI was one of the United States' first engineering and technology universities and now h ...

. After graduating, he travelled to the west coast to work for

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 ...

in their Advanced Systems Division. There he worked in the group that ported

IRIX IRIX (, ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS architecture, MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD extensio ...

to the

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

R8000 The R8000 is a microprocessor chipset developed by MIPS Technologies, MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI), Toshiba, and Weitek.Hsu 1994 It was the first implementation of the MIPS IV instruction set architecture. The R8000 is also known as the ''TFP'', f ...

microprocessor chip set and worked on the

RealityEngine RealityEngine is a 3D graphics hardware architecture and a family of graphics systems which was developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics during the early to mid 1990s. RealityEngine was positioned as the company's high-end visualization har ...

and InfiniteReality graphics systems. While working for Silicon Graphics, he located and fixed a bug in Discreet Logic's

Flame A flame () is the visible, gaseous part of a fire. It is caused by a highly exothermic chemical reaction made in a thin zone. When flames are hot enough to have ionized gaseous components of sufficient density, they are then considered plasm ...

compositing system that was delaying post-production of the motion picture ''

Speed In kinematics, the speed (commonly referred to as ''v'') of an object is the magnitude of the change of its position over time or the magnitude of the change of its position per unit of time; it is thus a non-negative scalar quantity. Intro ...

''. In October 1995, Giampaolo heard about the

BeBox The BeBox is a discontinued personal computer from Be Inc., running the company's operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), s ...

from a friend at a poker game. Shortly after visiting the

Be Inc. Be Inc. was an American computer company that created and developed the BeOS and BeIA operating systems, and the BeBox personal computer. It was founded in 1990 by former Apple Inc., Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée, who also served a ...

offices to see a demo of the computer, he began working on the BeOS, working initially in a number of areas including the

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

and the

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

layer but most notably developing the Be File System alongside Cyril Meurillon, which replaced the Old Be File System written by

Benoit Schillings Benoit Schillings is a Belgian software engineer who is vice president of technology at Google DeepMind. He was previously the chief technology officer at Google X leading early projects. He is known for being one of the lead developers of the ...

which had itself replaced the original flat file system written by Meurillon. The Be File System included a number of advances compared to other personal computer filesystems in use at the time, such as a

journal A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of personal secretive thoughts and as open book to personal therapy or used to feel connected to onesel ...

to improve reliability and support for extensive

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

that can be indexed to respond quickly to searches. After Be, Giampaolo worked at

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and then QNX Software Systems. While at QNX, he discovered a bug in the Instruction Fetch Unit of

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 ...

Pentium II The Pentium II is a brand of sixth-generation Intel x86 microprocessors based on the P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture, introduced on May 7, 1997. It combined the ''P6'' microarchitecture seen on the Pentium Pro with the MMX (instruc ...

and

Pentium III The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999 ...

processors. Since March 2002, Giampaolo has been working for Apple Inc., where he is part of the

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

file system (

Apple File System Apple File System (APFS) is a Proprietary software, proprietary file system developed and deployed by Apple Inc. for macOS macOS Sierra, Sierra (10.12.4) and later, iOS iOS 10 , 10.3, tvOS 10.2, watchOS 3.2, and all versions of iPadOS. It aim ...

project) and Spotlight groups.

Bibliography

*Giampaolo, Dominic (1999).
Practical File System Design with the Be File System
'. Morgan Kaufmann. .

References

External links

Dominic Giampaolo's personal homepageIntroducing Apple File System
{{DEFAULTSORT:Giampaolo, Dominic Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American University alumni Worcester Polytechnic Institute alumni American computer programmers Apple Inc. employees Be Inc. people Silicon Graphics people Google employees