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Born in Pennsylvania
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In late Ocotober of 1959, Kotok began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program. He described their work in his bachelors's thesis and in his MIT Artificial Intelligence Project Memo 41.
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The first first ever video game known as Spacewar was created. Kodok contributed his knowledge in building the game controllers that allowed two people to play side by side. Additional video attached below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L1HeZ2kPck -
Kotok became student staff programmer shortly after DEC donated the second PDP-1. This had produced to MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE).
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Kotok started writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4
before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set with others. -
At the early age of 16, Kotok became a full-time student at MIT College.
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In 1975, Kodok taught logic design at the University of California, Berkeley. Kodok taught for one academic year.
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Kodok's dedication and hard work earned himself a master's degree in business administration from Clark University in 1978. This helped prepare him for his later work at Digital and W3C.
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At this time Kodok was system architect and helped develop The VAX 8600 (known as Venus). This 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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The World Wide Web Consortium was founded by Kotok as he recognized the potential of the Web.
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Kotok maintained this position for one year.
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After a 34- year career, Alan Kotok retired from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the fall.
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Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum
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Alan Kotok passed away from a heart attack in Cambridge, MA.
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Edward Fredkin, McCarthy, Russell, Samson, Kotok and Harlan Anderson met at BBN Technologies 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.
