In this wide-ranging interview conducted by Edward Feigenbaum, Donald Knuth talks about the progression of his life and career. Topics include his family background and early interest in music, physics and mathematics, his first exposure to programming, finding a mentor, and writing a doctoral thesis. He describes how "The Art of Computer Programming" became "the story of my life", and why it was put on hold for the TeX and METAFONT projects. He also talks about personal work habits, programming style, analysis of algorithms, the influence of religion in his life, and his advice to the next generation of scientists.
Computer science legend John McCarthy speaks with Stanford University AI researcher and professor of computer science, Nil Nilsson. McCarthy discusses his early academic training and influences at Caltech and Princeton University. He then describes his early work at MIT and Dartmouth College in which he helped organize the highly influential Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the seminal first conference in the field. McCarthy then discusses his work at Stanford University and briefly summarizes some of the mathematical underpinnings of the logical models he uses in explaining and understanding computer systems.
Edwin Catmull’s career began at an important stage in the development of computer graphics, when declining costs of memory and computing power allowed for experimentation with new graphical techniques. After graduating from the University of Utah with a PhD in 1974 (in physics and computer science), Catmulll worked at graphics workstation vendor Applicon for a brief period. He then led the computer graphics group at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) where he worked with Alvy Ray Smith and others on computer animation techniques, culminating in the experimental film “Sunstone” by Smith and Ed Emshwiller. Invited by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, Catmull, Smith and others then formed the computer graphics group at Lucasfilm. The group spun out, creating Pixar, in 1986, which attracted financing from Apple Computer, Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs. Pixar was sold to Walt Disney Studios in 2006 where Catmull was made CEO of the newly-formed Walt Disney Animation Studios. In this oral history, Catmulll describes his long career and accomplishments in an interview with Computer History Museum CEO John Hollar.
Ray Ozzie was inspired by online collaboration in college, on the mainframe-based PLATO system. The arc of his career has been adapting collaborative features to successive platforms: Personal computers, the Internet, the cloud, mobile, and now the internet of things. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was a leading-edge computing environment for education created at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1960. By the early 1970s it was also evolving into perhaps the most vibrant early online community with many visionary capabilities. These included real-time chat, multi-player games, and collaborative documents, as well as email and discussion groups via a program called PLATO Notes. This early experience would shape Ozzie's career. His belief in providing access to everyone was solidified by his work with a quadriplegic programmer in college who used a mouthstick to type. Graduating in 1979, Ozzie began working at minicomputer maker Data General. But he and college buddies Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell desperately missed PLATO, and tried to adapt its communal features to various minicomputer platforms despite limited interest from their employers. Personal computers were beginning to take off, and Ray wondered whether they might be the right platform to spread collaborative features. He moved over to Software Arts, where he worked for cofounders Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston on VisiCalc, the legendary persoal computer spreadsheet package. But Bricklin and Frankston were too busy with current products to back his new venture. So Ray struck a deal with Lotus cofounder Mitch Kapor: Ray would create Symphony, a suite of applications extending the firm’s flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Then Lotus would back his own company to build his dream—collaborative software running on networked PCs. Ray's team delivered Symphony in just nine months. Mitch Kapor made good on his promise by funding Iris Associates with $1.3 million. Ray, Tim Halvorsen, and Len Kawell began building what would be named Lotus Notes, a system for collaboration using networked personal computers. When released in 1989, Notes became the defining “groupware” product used within large enterprises worldwide. Years before the web explosion, business users were introduced to core functions of PLATO's community: Email, discussion groups, calendars, chat, and to-do lists. When IBM absorbed Lotus in a hostile takeover, Notes was the prize. IBM pushed its users to 125 million worldwide. In 1997 Ray left IBM to bring Notes-like features to the internet with Groove Networks. Decentralization was in vogue at the time, and Groove Networks was fully optimized for peer-to-peer operation, like Napster or modern torrents, using a version of blockchain technology. However, the web began moving back toward centralization. 9/11 offered Groove a key niche—connecting government agencies together. The Iraq war and the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia created a need for decentralized communication. In 2005 Microsoft bought Groove Networks, which became part of SharePoint. Ray took over as Microsoft's chief software architect from none other than . . . Bill Gates. Ray pushed to take Microsoft toward online software and services, and championed Office 365 and the effort to build its Azure Cloud Services. But the company was slow to shift away from its huge PC-based Office revenue. Ray left Microsoft in 2010 and was soon part of the founding team at Safecast, a nonprofit global environmental monitoring effort organized in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. In 2012 Ray started Talko Inc. to make mobile apps and services for business groupware. The name was an homage to the PLATO system’s “Talkomatic” chat program. Ray sold Talko to Microsoft in December 2015. He then founded Blues Wireless to adapt global cellular infrastructure for the Internet of Things, including "citizen science" efforts like SafeCast.
Robert Elliot "Bob" Kahn is an American elctrical engineer, who, along with Vint Cerf, invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet. In 2004 Kahn won the A.M. turing Award, the highest honour in computer scinece, for the "pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking."
<p>Robert (Bob) Metcalfe led invention, standardization, and commercialization of the Ethernet local-area networking system for personal computers (PCs). Metcalfe was born on April 7, 1946 in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1969 with bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and industrial management. At Harvard University in 1970, he earned his master's degree in applied mathematics. His 1973 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, Packet Communication, came out of research on Arpanet at MIT Project MAC and on Alohanet at the University of Hawaii. In 1972, Metcalfe joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He worked in the Computer Science Laboratory led by Jerry Elkind, Bob Taylor, Butler Lampson, and Chuck Thacker, who were developing early PCs. Metcalfe, in collaboration with David Boggs, invented and developed the Ethernet local-area network (LAN) and its system of packet protocols, which have proliferated and evolved to become today's Internet plumbing. In 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com Corporation to promote "computer communication compatibility." 3Com initially developed PC LAN products based on emerging UNIX, TCP/IP, and Ethernet standards, went public in 1984, and grew into a billion-dollar networking company. Metcalfe served as the "marriage broker" who convinced DEC, Intel, and Xerox (DIX) to work together to promote Ethernet as an open standard.</p>
In this oral history, Margaret Hamilton describes her life and career in computing. She begins with a discussion of her family background and youth, including family influences, job experiences, and the development of her interest in mathematics at Earlham College. She reviews her first impressions of computing when working as an actuarial trainee. Her first work in programming with MIT professor Edward Lorenz follows, as does details of her subsequent work at Project MAC and the Lincoln Laboratory on SAGE. She reviews her work on the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer in detail, including her work on errors, alarms, software engineering, and her memorable experiences with the Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions. Afterward, she reviews her work on errors leading to formal methods for avoiding them, and for control theory more broadly, developing into the Universal Systems Language. She further details the support of this work, and her experiences in creating two companies to pursue it. The interview concludes with reflections on cultural issues in computing, and more broadly.
Mr. Narayana Murthy is an Indian Information Technology (IT) industrialist and the co-founder of Infosys, one of the largest multinational corporations providing business consulting, technology, engineering and outsourcing services. Mr. Murthy has been listed among the 12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time by Fortune magazine and has been described as the father of the Indian IT sector by Time magazine. Mr. Murthy coceptualized, articulated and implemented the Global Delivery Model (GDM), which has become the backbone of the Indian Software industry. Among his numerous awards, he has received the Padma Vibhushan, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Legion of Honor from France, the Ernst Weber Medal, the Hoover Medal, the Thomas Jefferson Medal, the Global Humanitarian Award and most recently the Founder's Medal from IEEE. He serves on numerous Boards across the Globe. Mr. Murthy, along with his wife Sudha Murthy, established the Infosys Foundation in 1996 to address the needs of the poorest of the poor and support higher education and research.
Edward Feigenbaum is a professor of Computer Science and co-scientific director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. Feigenbaum served as chief scientist of the United States Air Force from 1994 to 1997. Professor Feigenbaum was chairman of the Computer Science Department and director of the Computer Center at Stanford University. Until 1992, Feigenbaum was co-principal investigator of the national computer facility for applications of artificial intelligence to medicine and biology known as the SUMEX-AIM facility, established by the National Institute of Health (NIH) at Stanford University. He is past president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has served on the National Science Foundation Computer Science Advisory Board, an ARPA study committee for Information Science and Technology; and on the National Research Council's Computer Science and Technology Board. He has been a member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine. He was the co-editor of the encyclopedia, The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, and of the early book, Computers and Thought, published by McGraw-Hill. He is co-author of the McGraw-Hill book, Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Organic Chemistry: The DENDRAL Program and was the founding editor of the McGraw-Hill Computer Science Series. He is co-author with Pamela McCorduck of the book The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World, published by Addison-Wesley (1983) and by New American Library (1984). He is also co-author with Penny Nii and Pamela McCorduck of the book, The Rise of the Expert Company, on corporate successes in the use of expert systems, published by Times Books in New York and Macmillan in London (1988). He is a co-founder of three start-up firms in applied artificial intelligence, IntelliCorp, Teknowledge and Design Power Inc. and served as a member of the Board of Directors of IntelliCorp and Design Power Inc. He also was a member of the Board of Directors of Sperry Corporation prior to its merger with Burroughs. He is a member of the Advisory Council of the Kansai Silicon Valley Venture Forum. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1986. In the same year, he was elected to the Productivity Hall of Fame of the Republic of Singapore. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the honorary American College of Medical Informatics. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. He is the first recipient of the Feigenbaum Medal, an award established in his honor by the World Congress of Expert Systems. He was elected Fellow to the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in January 1994. He was a recipient of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He was named Kumagai Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University in 1995. He received the U.S. Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1997.
Mr. Boahen is a professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was born in 1964 in Ghana. His father was a professor of history at the University of Ghana and a very humble man. He wanted his children to be the same. As a child, Kwabena always enjoyed building and experimenting with things such as microscopes and electric motors. His parents were from different groups within the country and spoke different languages. As a result, the common language in the family home was English. He went off to a boarding school founded by Methodist Missionaries when he was 12. While there he won a national science fair competition for a corn planting machine which he and a friend had developed. His father has spent a sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University and that opened up the opportunity for Kwabena to study there. While there, he was introduced to how the brain worked and the concept that neural networks represented an alternative approach to computing. He took a course in VLSI design in his junior year and designed an analog approach to neuromorphic computing. He was using course notes and ideas coming from Carver Mead’s class at Caltech. These studies eventually led to his attending Caltech for graduate school where he earned a PhD under Carver Mead. He entered in 1990 and received his degree in 1996. His focus remained on neuromorphic computing…using an understanding of the human brain to develop more efficient computing elements. The target application was a silicon retina. Kwabena goes into great detail describing his research work and combining learning from the computing and biology domains. After earning his PhD, he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. In 2005 he left to join Stanford where he was at the time of the interview. At Stanford he directs Stanford’s Brains in Silicon Lab where he continues his work on melding the worlds of brains, biology and silicon.
In the first part of her oral history, Mary Allen Wilkes begins with a discussion of her family background and youth. She describes her experiences as a high school student at Baltimore Friends School, from which she graduated in 1955. She recounts her desire to be a lawyer and her affinity for mathematics and logic as she began her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, from which she graduated in 1959 as a philosophy major. Following the suggestion of an Eighth-grade teacher that she might enjoy computer programming, Wilkes applied for programming jobs at MIT immediately after graduation. She quickly secured a job at the Lincoln Laboratory, working for Oliver Selfridge and Ben Gold. After a year studying in Vienna, she returned to the Lincoln Lab in 1961 where she joined Wesley Clark’s group. There she participated in the effort to build the LINC computer from the earliest days. The majority of the oral history is devoted to Wilkes’ experiences in the LINC effort through 1965, where she led the development of its system software.
In this interview, Judea Pearl discusses his life and long career. He begins by recounting his family background, and then his youth and education in Israel. Next, Pearl discusses his army service, experience of a kibbutz, and his technical education as an undergraduate at the Technion. He also discusses his wife, the software developer Ruth Pearl, whom he met at the Technion. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to the United States, where Pearl studied electrical engineering while working. He discusses his work at RCA’s Sarnoff Laboratory and his PhD, both in superconducting electronics, at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Pearl then recounts the couple’s move to California in the mid 1960s, with Ruth Pearl working at TRW and he at Electronic Memories. With the rise of semiconductor electronics, Pearl decided to move into software and secured a faculty position at UCLA, where he has remained ever since. He recounts his moves into statistics and artificial intelligence at UCLA, and details his route to the development of Bayesian Networks. Pearl details his work on Bayesian Networks, and the trajectory of his work on causal reasoning. The interview concludes with Pearl’s reflections on his work, the state of artificial intelligence research, and his involvements with the Daniel Pearl Foundation and issues related to Israel.
<p>African-American brothers and software entrepreneurs Stephan and William Adams created their own software company, Adamation, in the 1980s that blazed a trail writing both shrinkwrapped consumer and custom enterprise applications software for Steve Jobs’ NeXT platform. Today, Stephan is the CEO of a fiber optic company in the U.S. Virgin Islands, while William has created LEAP, a program at Microsoft that helps recruit, mentor, and train young engineers of minority backgrounds to prepare them for success in the technology industry. In this oral history, the brothers discuss growing up in Orange County, attending college at UC Berkeley and becoming fans of the Macintosh, their experiences starting and running Adamation, first as a NeXT software company and later delving into Taligent. William then discusses his later career at BeOS and then Microsoft, where he created the LEAP program, while Stephan discusses expanding and then shutting down Adamation during the dot.com bust, working with his mentor, African-American executive and investor Michael Fields, restarting Adamation in the 2010s as a 3D printing company, and his current venture in the Virgin Islands. Both brothers also discuss barriers they faced as African-American entrepreneurs and the complex interplay between race and meritocracy in Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>Alfred Aho was born to a Finnish family in Timmis, Ontario, and moved with his family to Toronto at the age of two. He started at the University of Toronto in 1959, majoring in engineering physics, where he became interested in the modeling of Boolean circuits using Boolean algebra. Aho continued on to a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Princeton, where he studied under John Hopcroft. At Princeton, Aho met Jeffrey Ullman, with whom he would forge a lifelong collaboration. Aho and Ullman both joined the newly formed Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs upon graduation in 1967. (This is the lab that would produce Unix and C.) Aho and Ullman embarked upon projects related to automata theory, language theory, algorithms, and programming languages, as well as database theory. Aho’s collaborations with Ullman and others at Bell Labs were very productive, producing five books in the first ten years, including The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (1974) with Hopcroft and Ullman. One collaboration, the result of Aho helping a bibliographer, Margaret Corasick, optimize her keyword search program, led to the publication of the Aho-Corasick string search algorithm. A collaboration with Ullman and Steve Johnson led to the creation of the parser generator yacc, using Don Knuth’s LR parsing algorithm. Aho was also an early adopter of Unix within Bell Labs, using the roff tool to typeset his papers. The combination of yacc and lex, a lexical analyzer generator created by Michael Lesk and optimized by Eric Schmidt, who applied one of Aho’s regular expression pattern matching algorithms to lex, became a quick way to construct the front end of a compiler. Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry used yacc and lex to create EQN, a tool for typesetting mathematical notation, which would be adopted by Knuth in TeX. Ullman and Aho then codified their accumulated ideas and practical experience with parsers and other phases of compilation into the dragon books, the canonical textbooks on compilers, the first of which was published in 1977. The second edition in 1980 added a coauthor, Ravi Sethi, and added more material about the construction of efficient compilers. The third edition was published in 2007. Aho also created the AWK language with Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan, a Unix tool that matches patterns and executes actions in response, that was extremely useful for writing short two-line programs for routine administrative data processing tasks. Aho’s experience in compiler theory and design led to the creation of a 15-week course at Columbia University, where he joined in 1995 as chair of the computer science department. In his course, students created their own original programming languages and compilers, and incorporated software engineering lessons Aho had learned from a stint as an executive at Bellcore (the research arm of the Baby Bells) between leaving Bell Labs and joining Columbia. One of the students in the course, Krysta Svore, became Aho’s Ph.D. student and created a quantum computing programming language for her thesis, going on to become Microsoft’s VP of quantum computing. Aho’s collaboration with Svore introduced him into the world of quantum computing. In the 2000s, Aho also explored the idea of “computational thinking.” Aho rejoined Bell Labs in 1997 before returning to Columbia in 2002.</p>
In his oral history Kamal Al Mansour tells how went from practicing intellectual property law at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to creating the first major Afrocentric content for personal computers as an artist. Growing up in Los Angeles, he had shown little interest in computing. As a child he'd dreamed of being an artist, and was mentored by African American artist Varnette Honeywood. He majored in political science at UCLA and then went on to UC Hastings law school in San Francisco, from which he ended up at JPL. His job got him interested in technology, and also showed him how little room it offered for African-Americans or their culture. It was a TV show that changed the course of his career. A Princeton professor was showing off a new disk called "Culture" and Al Mansour noticed that while it covered the Greek Parthenon, it left out all of Africa's contributions from the Pyramids to the obelisks of Aksum. He realized he could act. He started with CPTime Clip Art, the first major disk of Afrocentric imagery for personal computers. The title wryly reclaimed the expression "Colored People's Time," a stereotype that African Americans run late. For Al Mansour it became a call to action: “it’s our time, it’s time for people of color to be online, to be digital.” He also started a dial-up service for research and messaging, CPTime On-Line. He followed up with "Who We Are," a program with hundreds of questions and answers about black civilizations. Soon Al Mansour had a catalog of titles addressing different topics and a program that sought to raise the self-esteem of black youth. His materials were being bought by school districts and universities, and covered in major print and TV media. But as bigger organizations like NetNoir began to provide Afrocentric content for the exploding online world, Al Mansour chose not to follow. He became a fine artist full time, working with both Afrocentric and universal themes. He is the author of DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS: From a Dystopian Diaspora to Afrofuturism.
Apple Computer would likely not exist today were it not for Mike Markkula. His impact on Silicon Valley and the world far exceeds his visibility and fame. This oral history is a major step in filling that gap. Mike was born in Los Angeles in 1942 and grew up in the LA suburb of Burbank. He gravitated towards an engineering career starting in high school. He worked his way through college at USC, doing a wide variety of jobs, including building stereos, working in a gas station and auto body shop, a supermarket and several others. He began work at Hughes Aircraft while still in college. He did so well, they paid for him to continue on and get his master’s degree as well. He loved the work at Hughes, where he got to design advanced avionics for leading-edge aircraft. After spending 4 years at Hughes, he decided to look around at other positions. At the last minute, after accepting a job at Space Technology Labs, he changed his mind and moved to Mt. View to work for Fairchild Semiconductor as a marketing engineer. He spent 4 years at Fairchild, experiencing great success, but when he got a call from Intel in 1970 to join Noyce, Moore and others he had known, he was eager to make the change. By 1974, he had met a personal goal to become financially independent and had developed a list of 52 things he wanted to do, so he resigned from Intel. One of the things he decided to do was spend one day a week (Monday) advising entrepreneurs who were launching their own ventures. A couple of those entrepreneurs in 1976 were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Mike was blown away by the cleverness of the design of the Apple II and the opportunity which it represented. He offered to help the two Steves write a business plan and raise money. When they showed no inclination to do that, he wrote the plan himself….and then used his network and reputation to raise the necessary funds. Founding stock was split equally among the three founders. Mike was so excited by the opportunity in front of them, he decided to abandon retirement, recruited a CEO for the new company and took the dual role of Chairman of the Board and VP of Marketing. He remained on the Board for 20 years and made monumental contributions to the growth and success of Apple. Markkula always considered ethics in business to be of paramount performance. He brought those ideas to Apple and in 1986, he helped fund the establishment of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Today it is the largest ethics center in the world and something in which Mike takes huge pride.
<p>Daniel H. H. Ingalls Jr. was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C. His father was a Sanskrit professor at Harvard who had worked for the OSS in WWII doing codebreaking. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in physics in 1966, Ingalls attended graduate school at Stanford studying electrical engineering. Motivated by learnings from a course taught by Don Knuth, Ingalls dropped out of graduate school to start a one-man company optimizing programs for local companies. In the course of his business he met George White, a speech recognition researcher at Xerox PARC, who invited Ingalls to join him there. Once inside PARC, Ingalls began to be more interested in the conversations taking place across the hallway, in Alan Kay’s office. Conversations with Kay led to a bet that Kay could design a programming language small enough to fit on a single page, which became Smalltalk-72. Ingalls quickly implemented Kay’s design in BASIC, and soon after wrote a version that would run on PARC’s Alto personal computer. Ingalls ended up joining Kay’s Learning Research Group, becoming,the lead developer of a succession of Smalltalk iterations at PARC, including Smalltalk-74, 76, 78, and 80. Two key innovations were BitBlt (Bit Block Transfer), a widely adopted graphics primitive, and the byte coded interpreter, both implemented in the Alto’s microcode, allowing for these operations to take place quickly. In 1979, Ingalls played a key role in demonstrating Smalltalk to a delegation from Apple, including Steve Jobs, introducing to him the graphical user interface and the advantages of live programming. Around 1984/85, Ingalls decided to join Apple’s Advanced Technology Group to work on getting Smalltalk to run well on the Apple Macintosh. At Apple, Ingalls designed Fabrik, a visual programming language. After taking an eight-year break from the technology industry to help run the family hotel in Virginia, Ingalls returned to Apple in 1993, where he rejoined with Alan Kay to create Squeak, a portable, open-source version of Smalltalk-80 implemented in Smalltalk itself. Soon after the release of Squeak, most of Kay’s group, including Ingalls, moved from Apple to Disney Imagineering, and the group created Etoys, a graphical educational programming environment implemented on top of Squeak. Etoys became an influence on the more widely adopted educational language Scratch, created at the MIT Media Lab. A few years after leaving Disney in 2001, Ingalls ended up at Sun in 2005, writing a Java interpreter for Squeak that was later converted to JavaScript, leading to the Lively Kernel, a live programming environment that runs in a web browser. Ingalls continued to work on Lively Kernel after joining SAP in 2010, later spinning out into a research group that ended up with Y Combinator. In recent years, Ingalls has restored historical versions of Smalltalk, from 72 through Squeak, that run in the web browser on top of Lively Kernel.</p>
John Vittal is best known for having created one of the very first modern, integrated email programs, MSG, which would deepen email’s hold as the initial “killer application” on the net. He also helped develop email standards still in use today. Born and raised in Southern California, he went to Brigham Young University as an undergraduate before graduate studies in Computer Science at UC Irvine. He then joined ISI (USC's Information Sciences institute), which was heavily involved in early networking with ARPA. Since the early 1960s email and messaging had existed in various forms on timesharing systems, where multiple users share a single computer. As ARPANET began to connect different computers and their groups of users together for the first time, ways of sending email across the network began exploding in popularity. But early networked email lacked many convenient features familiar today, like being able to organize messages and easily reply or forward. ARPANET users had to do a lot of hand copying and formatting to manage their mail, for example using Ray Tomlinson’s SNDMSG program to send it, and Larry Roberts’ separate RD program to read it. Vittal's 1974 MSG program combined these and other functions into a single, convenient package, establishing a model used by email programs up to the present. Vittal soon moved to BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) in the Boston area for further work on email funded by ARPA (Advanced Resarch Projects Agency). BBN had developed critical hardware and software for ARPANET, a key part of the later Internet. He participated in a number of early working groups and standards committees for email, while his main professional work gradually moved to other interests including AI, user experience, transportable programming, and project management. In 1982 he moved to Xerox where he managed the group that provided consulting and training services around AI. As a senior research manager at GTE from the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, he saw messaging and other connected functions reach the masses. There, at Verizon and later he managed a wide range of research and development groups, served on many boards and as an advisor to a wide range of startup companies on both business and technical issues. Vittal has had numerous publications, and been an invited speaker at many national and international conferences. He has been a member of Internet Society, IETF, ACM, IEEE, and American Association of Artificial Intelligence. Vittal worked with ARPAnet and Internet pioneer Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler to create the Email Bibliographic Timeline, which since 2022 is in the Museum’s collection along with many of the documents it cites