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Alan Kotok was born November 9th 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. However, he was raised in Vineland New Jersey.
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Begins at MIT at age 16 after skipping 2 grades at Vineland High School.
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Kotok joins the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and meets other members such as Peter Samson, Robert A Saunders, David Gross, and Robert A Wagner.
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In spring takes MIT’s first ever course in programming taught by John McCarthy.
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Several students, Kotok included, begin working on McCarthy’s IBM 704 chess program. This would be the first computer program to convincingly play chess.
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Writes the Dec Debugging Tape (DDT) program, a legendary achievement.
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DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) donates the new PDP-1 to MIT and Kotok along with other members of the TMRC work as support staff programming the new computer.
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Kotok is Hired at DEC after graduating from MIT and would go on to work there for 34 years.
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Kotok and Saunders create the first game controllers for the PDP-1 that allowed Spacewar! to be played by two people sitting next to each other.
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McCarthy, now at Stanford, visits the Soviet Union, and has his Kotok-McCarthy chess program challenged to a match by a program from a group at the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP).
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From 1966 till 1967 over the course of 9 months the chess match between the Kotok-McCarthy program and Moscow's ITEP program is played out by telegraph. The Kotok-McCarthy program loses 3-1.
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From Clark University Kotok receives an MBA.
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Kotok helps to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
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Kotok retires from DEC after 34 years with the company.
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Kotok becomes the associate chairman of the W3C after spearheading the “birds of a feather meeting”, held at the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW6), on Selection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases. During which he presented Micropayment Systems to the Electronic Payments forum.
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At the Computer History Museum, Kotok records an oral history.
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On May 26th 2006 Alan Kotok passes from a heart attack, only six months after his wife had passed during her cancer treatment.
