This Day in History

January 6, 1942

Computer researcher Peter Denning is Born

Peter Denning is born. He received a BEE from Manhattan College in 1965 and a PhD from MIT in 1968. He was head of the computer science department at Purdue University (1979-83), co-founder of CSNET and first chair of the CSNET executive committee (1981-1986), and the founding director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at the NASA Ames Research Center (1983-1990). Since 1991 he has become Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University. He was president of the Association for Computing Machinery (1980-1982), and chair of the ACM publications board (1992-1998) where he led the development of the ACM digital library. Denning has published six books and 260 articles on computers, networks, and their operating systems. Denning published two well-received papers that established a scientific and rational basis for virtual memory computer operating systems in 1966 and 1970.