What Happened on February 15th

Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the programming language Pascal, is born in Winterhur, Switzerland. He received an MS from University Laval in 1960, and a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. During 1963-1967 he taught at Stanford, and from 1967 to 1975 he was professor of computer science at the University of Zurich. From 1975 to 1999, Wirth was a professor of computer science at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. Originally Pascal was intended to serve only as a tool for teaching programming. Oberon, another Wirth project, is a combination of a programming language and operating system for single user personal workstations. His most recent project, CADtools for hardware design, aims to bridge the gap between software and hardware. Wirth has received ACM's A.M. Turing Award, and the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award.