Michael Leonidas Dertouzos (; November 5, 1936 – August 27, 2001) was a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) from 1974 to 2001. Dertouzos predicted the expansion of computer use very early, and was one of the pioneers in many areas of technology. These included his contributions to the Web particularly through his visionary approach to ubiquitous computing.

Early life

Dertouzos was born in

Athens, Greece Athens ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica (region), Attica region and is the southe ...

. His father was an admiral in the Greek navy and the young Dertouzos often accompanied him aboard destroyers and submarines. This experience cultivated his interest in technology so that he learned

Morse code Morse code is a telecommunications method which Character encoding, encodes Written language, text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code i ...

, shipboard machinery, and mathematics at an early age. When he was 16, he came across

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

's work on

information theory Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, ...

and MIT's attempt to build a mechanical mouse robot; these were said to have driven him to study in the university. Dertouzos went to high school at Athens College. He came to the United States to study after the end of

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study electrical engineering. Dertouzos completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Arkansas in 1957 and 1959. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1964.

Career

After graduating, he immediately joined the faculty of MIT, where he stayed for the rest of his career. During Dertouzos's term, LCS innovated in a variety of areas, including RSA

encryption In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...

, the

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

, the NuBus, the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

, and the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

. Dertouzos was instrumental in creating the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

and bringing it to MIT. He was a firm supporter of the

GNU Project The GNU Project ( ) is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing dev ...

, Richard Stallman, and the FSF, and their continued presence at MIT. He was also the sponsor of Project Oxygen at MIT, which aimed to develop "pervasive, human-centered computing through a combination of specific user and system technologies". In 1968, he co-founded Computek, Inc., a manufacturer of

graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of the data, as in design and manufa ...

and intelligent terminals, with Marvin C. Lewis and Dr. Huber Graham. He died on August 27 2001 at Massachusetts General Hospital at the age of 64. He is buried at the First Cemetery of Athens.

Honours

On November 5, 2018,

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recognized him with a doodle.

Bibliography

*Dertouzos, '' The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us'', 2001, . *Dertouzos, ''What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives'', 1997, . *"Communications, Computers and Networks", in '' Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks'', September, 1991 *(co-author), ''Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge'', 1989, .

References

External links

Oral history interview with Michael L. Dertouzos
Charles Babbage Institute

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

. Dertouzos discusses his research in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Project MAC's change under his direction to the Laboratory for Computer Science. The bulk of the interview concerns MIT's relationship with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). Topics include:

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

, distributive systems, networking,

multiprocessing Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...