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On November 9th, 1941, Alan Kotok was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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In the Fall of 1958, Kotok began attending MIT. He shortly joined the Tech Model Railroad Club during the beginning of his freshman year.
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DEC donated a PDP-1 to the lab in September 1961. The hackers of TRMC caught wind of the information and applied to be student staff programmers. Kotok was one of the six who were selected.
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Kotok and Robert Saunders work together to build a controller for Spacewar!. The two created the first video game controllers that two players could use when playing side-by-side.
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During his time at DEC, Kotok held the positions of chief architect of PDP-10 computers and senior engineer for multiple DEC organizations.
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In June 1962, Kotok submits his papers that cover his development of a chess playing program on the IBM 7090.
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/17406/33316111-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 -
Kotok helps Steve Russell by acquiring sine and cosine routines from DEC that will later help when creating the codes for Spacewar!.
http://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/607a6b03406ff7659f9d1965dbf28027/ -
Learning from the FLIT debugging program, Kotok improves the idea and creates the DDT which allowed hackers to examine what was wrong with the program while still using the program.
http://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/189cc577e7b13aafbb0efab4c547d262/
http://s3data.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/DEC.pdp_1.1964.102650078.pdf -
Kotok played a key role in the development of PDP-6 while working in DEC. During the project he held the position of the Logic Designer.
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Kotok received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1962 and his Master of Science in Electircal Engineering in 1965.
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Kotok was placed in charge of DEC's Alta Vista project whish was an early development of a search engine.
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Kotok joins the W3C board as an associate chairman in 1997 and held his position until he passed away.
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In June 1997, Kotok publishes his first book with Ralph Lyman called Print Communication and the Electronic Media Challenge.
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After restoring the PDP-1 computer, Kotok and his old friends from TRMC gather to talk about the importance of the development of the PDP-1 computer at the Computer History Museum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8zU8WQO-PY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHTa3EfzrNE -
On May 26th, 2006 Alan Kotok died at the age of 64.
