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Born
Alan Kotok was born on November 9th, 1941 in Philadelphia, PA. Kotok grew up in New Jersey. During his childhood, he played with tools in his father's hardware store and learned about model railroading. Kotok was extremely bright and skipped two grades in high school. -
The Start
Kotok would often describe his 1956 encounter with a "giant thinking machine" on a school field trip to the Mobil Research Lab in New Jersey as the "spark that triggered" him to fall in love with computers -
MIT
Kotok was accepted into MIT at age 16. During his freshman year he joined the TMRC. At MIT, Kotok earned bachelor and master's degrees in electrical engineering -
Chess
Along with his classmates, Kotok began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program in 1959. By the time the students graduated in 1962, their program was comparable to an "amateur with about 100 games experience" on an IBM 7090. -
SpaceWar!
Alan Kotok and his colleagues developed the idea for the first video game, SpaceWar! in 1961. -
SpaceWar! cont.
In 1962, SpaceWar! had its first version up and running. At its launch, Spacewar featured two spaceships that fired missiles at each other. Each player used keyboard controls or a joystick to control a small rocket ship that fired torpedoes. -
DEC
After graduating from MIT, Kotok began working at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He began in 1962 by writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4, before contributing to the development of the PDP-5. Kotok later went on to be the chief architect of the PDP-10 family of computers. -
Teaching
Kotok taught logic design at the University of California, Berkeley -
Marriage
In 1977, at age 36, Kotok married Judith McCoy, a choir director and piano teacher at Longy School of Music. -
Venus
With Kotok as system architect, VAX 8600 (known as Venus) was introduced. It was the highest-performing computer system in DEC’s history to date. It operated up to 4.2 times faster than the standard system at the time -
Steven Levy
Kotok and his classmates are described as the first true hackers in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy -
Retiring
In 1996, Kotok retired from the DEC after working there for 34 years -
W3C
Kotok joined W3C as associate chairman in May 1997. He managed contractual relations with W3C hosts and member organizations, coordinated the worldwide W3C Systems and Web Team services to millions of pages and resources on the W3C website, and maintained the W3C host site at the MIT CSAIL. -
Oral History
Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum in 2004 -
Death
Alan Kotok passed away in his home in Cambridge from a heart attack on May 26, 2006,