Douglas McIlroy
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a
mathematician,
engineer and
programmer. As of 2006 he is an Adjunct Professor of
Computer Science at
Dartmouth College.
Dr. McIlroy is best known for having invented:
*The
pipes and filters architecture of
Unix as seen in the
Unix pipeline implementation.
*The entire concept of
software componentry*Several
Unix tools, such as spell,
diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.
Dr. McIlroy earned his
Bachelor's degree in engineering physics from
Cornell University in
1954, and a
Ph.D. in applied mathematics from
MIT in
1959 for his thesis
On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells. He joined
Bell Laboratories in 1958, from 1965-1986 was head of its Computing Techniques Research Department (thebirthplace of the
Unix operating system), and thereafter was Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. He retired from Bell Labs in 1997.
He is a member of the
National Academy of Engineering, and has won both the
USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") and its Software Tools award. He has previously served the
Association for Computing Machinery as national lecturer,
Turing Award chairman, member of the publications planning committee, and associate editor for the
Communications of the ACM, the
Journal of the ACM, and
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. He alsoserved on the executive committee of
CSNET.
*
Doug McIlroy's homepage*
Biography
