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Alan Kotok was born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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Kotok began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program. Kotok described their work in MIT Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 41 and in his bachelor's thesis.
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Kotok was credited with building the game controllers that allowed two people to play side by side
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In September of 1961, DEC donated the second PDP-1 it had produced to MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE). Kotok became student staff programmer shortly thereafter.
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before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set
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Kotok entered MIT at age 16
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he taught logic design at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1975–1976 academic year
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earned a master's degree in business administration from Clark University in 1978, which prepared him for later work at Digital and W3C.
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With Kotok as system architect, the VAX 8600 (known as Venus) was introduced as the highest-performance computer in Digital's history to date, operating up to 4.2 times faster than the standard at the time.
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Kotok recognized the Web's potential, and helped to found the World Wide Web Consortium
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Alan Kotok retired from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the fall of 1996 after a 34-year career.
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Edward Fredkin, at one time at BBN Technologies , McCarthy, Russell, Samson, Kotok and Harlan Anderson met in May 2006 for a panel to celebrate the Computer History Museum's restoration of a PDP-1. Their presentations illustrated the contributions of TX-0 and PDP-1 users to early software.
