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Alan Kotok was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Kotak began his freshman year as an electrical engineer at MIT in the fall of 1958.
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Kotok and a few other TMRC hackers took over the chess-programming project from John McCarthy, and eventually
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Sometime in 1961, Kotak found a way to manipulate an FM receiver with an analog-to-digital converter on the computer to form the "Expensive Tape Recorder."
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A group of 6 programmers including Kotok spent 250 hours in one weekend re-writing the FRAP assembler for the new PDP-1. (Kotok in the middle)
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At the annual MIT Open House, the TMRC showed the public the Spacebar game and left it open for the public to play. Kotak had helped build the game, and also created the first computer joystick.
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Kotok was first hired part-time at DEC, and stayed with his company as his job later became an important designing position for the computers of the PDP-10 family.
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As his first assignment after being hired by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1962, Kotok began writing a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-4, before moving on to the instruction set for the PDP-5.
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In 1966-1967, Greenblatt went back over Kotok's chess program and rewrote it because he "thought it was crap." He rewrote the program, and after a week, he had the program playing tournament level chess.
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Kotok taught logic design at the University of California Berkeley during the 1975-1976 academic year.
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In 1978, Kotok received a master's degree in Business Administration from Clarke university.
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In 1994, Kotok helped pushed the creation of the World Wide Web Consortium along with other members of DEC.
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Kotak retired from his job at DEC in 1996, after working there for 34 years.
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In May of 1997, Kotok joined W3C as an associate chairman while also working on the Management team and working closely with the Advisory Board.
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Kotak passed away from a heart attack in his home in Cambridge, Mass.
