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Alan Kotok was born in Philadelphia and was raised in New Jersey. He was an incredibly bright child and skipped 2 grades. He began playing with his fathers tools and learned about model railroading.
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At the age of 16 Alan Kotok began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he earned his bachelor degree and master's degrees in electrical engineering.
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In spring Kotok takes MIT’s first ever course in programming taught by John McCarthy.
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Kotok along with a few classmates, began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess playing program
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Kotok contributed to the development of Spacewar! the first video game. He built the game controllers that allowed two people to play side by side.
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In September of 1961, the DEC donated the PDP-1 to MIT. Shortly after this, Kotok became apart of the student staff programming team at RLE who re-wrote the code for Ed Fredkin's FRAP assembler for the PDP-1
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Kotok started at Digital Equipment Corporation where he began writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4 before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set
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Apart of the team at DEC that designed and developed the PDP-6. Kotok was given the position of assistant logic designer for the project.
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Kotok taught logic design at the University of California Berkeley during the 1975-1976 academic year.
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Alan Kotok received an M.B.A from Clark University
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Kotok helps invent the VAX 8600, which at the time 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 found the World Wide Web Consortium
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Kotok retired from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the fall of 1996 after working there for 34 years.
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Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum
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Kotok died at his home in Cambridge from a heart attack on May 26, 2006
