Fernando J. Corbató

Quotes

• “Clearly, one can obfuscate one's ideas with a compiler language but it's harder. To some extent one is talking about what one wants rather than how one wants to do it. The trouble with machine code, of course, is that when you look at a random section of machine code you don't know what properties of the instructions the programmer really wanted to exploit.”
• “Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!”
• “The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.”
• “Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm.”
• “The computer field is intoxicated with change. We have seen galloping growth over a period of four decades and it still does not seem to be slowing down. The field is not mature yet and already it accounts for a significant percentage of the Gross National Product.”
• “To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were more than a second.”

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Key dates

Born

1 July 1926

Died

12 July 2019

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Wikidata facts

Instance of

human

Gender

male

Citizenship

United States

Place of birth

Oakland

Place of death

Newburyport

Occupation

university teacher

Educated at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Employer

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Languages spoken

English language

Award

Harry H. Goode Memorial Award

Notable work

Compatible Time-Sharing System

Doctoral advisor

John C. Slater

Conflict

World War II

Image

Fernando Corbato.jpg

via Wikidata · CC0