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Born in Philadelphia
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Sees a "giant thinking machine" at SOCON Mobile Research Lab on a field trip in high school. Got the chance to program it and decided that computers were where he wanted to be.
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Entered MIT at 16 to study Electrical Engineering. Joined the Tech Model Railroad Club.
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Hackers got access to the Tx-0 and started writing programs nonstop
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After taking McCarthy's programming class spring semester, McCarthy brought on Kotok to help with his chess program the summer. Started by writing subroutines to be used in the larger program.
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Hackers got access to PDP-1.
Kotok and others wrote assembler for it in a single, 250 man-hour weekend.
Kotok wrote the DEC Debugging Tape (DDT) -
Invented first joysticks to play Spacewar! with Bob Saunders. Kotok additionally helped with the creation of Spacewar! by motivating Russel to finish it, as well as physically obtaining copies of a sine-cosine routine from DEC.
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Hired at DEC after finishing his senior year as an undergraduate at MIT.
Picture depicts the PDP-6 team -
Worked on efficient FORTRAN compiler to run on the PDP-4 at DEC while he was taking classes part time at MIT to get his Masters degree
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Published paper for his Bachelors thesis. Made a chess playing program under Dr. McCarthy with the help of other students for the IBM 7090 in FORTRAN and assembly. This program tried to guess opponents future moves, utilizing the "alpha-beta" heuristic. The MacHack IV was a better version of this program created by fellow TMRC hacker Ricky Greenblatt.
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Started working on a 12 bit instruction set to be used for the PDP-5. This marks the transition from software to hardware for Kotok.
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Moved to the PDP-6 team as the logic designer, working alongside the chief designer Gordon Bell
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Kotok went on a sales trip to Australia with others on the team to sell the new PDP-6 to the major universities who were looking for an upgrade.
Picture shows Kotok and others working on proposals in the hotel while there. -
Became chief architect for the PDP-10 because Gordon Bell had left to Carnegie. Started with the KA10 model, which fixed many of the mechanical and electronic reliability issues that the PDP-6 had, resulting in a faster and better selling computer that came out in 1967.
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This version of the PDP-10 used integrated circuits rather than discrete transistor logic, like in the KA10 model. The KI10 came out at the end of 1970
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The KL10 used micro-program control rather than hardware logic, and was designed using more Computer Aided Design. The KL10 came out in 1975
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Took a 9-month sabbatical to teach Computer Science classes for the 1975-1976 year at UC Berkeley after being offered a position there, and then went back to work on new projects at DEC. He taught classes including Logic Design and Telephone Switching.
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Worked with others to start the W3C, and stayed on with them as an associate chairman after retiring from DEC in 1996 until his death
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After 34 years of working for DEC, Kotok moved on to a new segment in his life at W3C and as a contractor for other companies This interview provides more details about these topics and more
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Died of a heart attack in his home in Cambridge
