Jack Dennis

Jack Bonnell Dennis is an American electrical engineer and a computer scientist. Dennis entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1949 as an electrical engineering major; he received his M.S. degree in 1954, and continued doctoral research and received his Sc.D. in 1958. He became a full professor in 1969. He was involved in early work on time-sharing through the PDP-1 which his group owned at MIT; that machine is famous in compu... more

Jack Bonnell Dennis is an American electrical engineer and a computer scientist. Dennis entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1949 as an electrical engineering major; he received his M.S. degree in 1954, and continued doctoral research and received his Sc.D. in 1958. He became a full professor in 1969. He was involved in early work on time-sharing through the PDP-1 which his group owned at MIT; that machine is famous in computer science as the machine on which hacker culture started. He shepherded the MIT Model Railroad Club. Later, he was one of the founding members of the Multics project, to which he contributed one of its most important concepts, the single-level memory. Multics, though not particularly commercially successful in itself, was an inspiration for Ken Thompson to develop Unix. The latter part of his career was devoted to non-von Neumann models of computation, architecture, and languages. He wanted to free programs from the concept of a program... less