Fernando Corbato, the father of your computer (and password), died at 93

Fernando Jose Corbato at the MIT computer lab (date unknown). His time-sharing computer access system, developed there, paved the way for a personal computer

Fernando Jose Corbato , whose design for a time-sharing computer access system developed in the 1960s helped pave the way for a personal computer as well as a computer password, died on Friday July 12 at a nursing home in Newbyport, Massachusetts. He was 93 years old.
')
His wife, Emily Corbato, said the cause was a complication of diabetes. At the time of his death, he was an honorary professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Corbato, who worked for MIT throughout his career, led the project in the 1960s under the name Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), which gave many users from different places simultaneous access to one computer via telephone lines.

At that time, the calculations were carried out in large data packets, and users usually had to wait the next day to get the results of the calculations.

In a 1963 interview on television, Corbato described the batch processing of “raging” people because of his inefficiency. The advancement of the idea of ​​time sharing supported the idea, still in its infancy, that computers can be used interactively. And this idea will fuel the field of computer science for decades.

“Long before personal computers made it possible for everyone to buy a personal computer, time sharing has changed the way people use computers,” said Stephen Crocker, an IT specialist and pioneer of Internet development who worked on time sharing systems.

Corbato explained time-sharing techniques in a 1963 interview taken by reporter John Fitch and featured on the WGBH documentary series MIT Science Reporting. Instead of the bulky computer of those years, he used a modified typewriter mounted on an electronics box.

In the program, he explained that computers are so expensive that they are very sorry to lose their downtime. But with a time-sharing system, computer time is carefully taken into account, and losses are eliminated.

A computer could perform only one operation at a time, under the control of a controller program. However, it worked so fast that it could switch from one task to another unnoticed by users.

Each user “will be able to create, edit and execute programs interactively, as if he has only one control over the computer,” wrote popular science writer Mitchell Waldrop in his 2001 Dream Machine book, dedicated to the personal computer visionary, Joseph Karl Robnett Liklider .

In an interview, Corbato compared the controller program to a grandmaster playing simultaneous games with many players and allowing them to reflect on his moves while he runs from one board to another.


When Corbato led the CTSS project, computers were seen as just giant calculators. But when his team demonstrated the new system in late 1962, this view began to change.

“To this day, I remember how people began to understand how the system works only when they saw a real demonstration: Hey, it answers! Wow! You enter a request and get an answer right away! ”He said in a 1989 interview at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, an archival and research center specializing in information technology.

CTSS spawned the successor project to Multics, which was also led by Corbato. He told the Babbage Institute: “Multics began as a list of desires of what I would like to see in a large computer system, which may be released as a commercial model.”

Multics was a joint brainchild of MIT, Bell Labs from AT&T and General Electric. Commercially, it failed, but inspired Bell's team of computer scientists to create UNIX, a computer operating system that originated in the 1970s and became widespread in the 80s and 90s.

Early work with computer technology at MIT, in which Corbato played a key role, helped inspire confidence in computer science, as one of the areas of scientific research. “It really was the beginning of a community of computer scientists,” he said.

In an interview with WGBH, Corbato showed how he types commands on a modified typewriter, and the computer instantly responds to them. The head of the typewriter began to rotate, and words began to appear on paper, as if some kind of spirit had taken hold of the typewriter.

“The worst thing is that we made the computer extremely easy to use,” he prophetically told Fitch. “Therefore, computers will be used more and more.”

Fernando Jose Corbato was born July 1, 1926 in Auckland, California, with Hermenegildo and Charlotte Corbato. His father, born in Villarreal, Spain, was a professor of Spanish literature. When he got a job at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1930, his family moved south.

Dr. Corbato, friends known as Corby, entered the same university in 1943. Seven months later, because the Second World War was at that time, he was recruited into the navy for the position of electrical engineer.

The fleet needed people to service, support, "and find errors in the vast array of equipment that the ships were clogged with," he said in an interview for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in 2006. He said that this experience has inspired him throughout his life to search for errors in systems.

In 1946, he left the fleet and entered the California Institute of Technology under a decree on the redeployment of military personnel from 1944 (known as GI Bill). In 1950, he graduated from the university with a bachelor's degree in physics and got a postgraduate course at MIT the same fall.

For his doctorate in molecular physics, volumetric calculations were needed, which required the help of a computer. “This work was very difficult, and judging from today's perspective, it’s very boring,” he told the museum. “But she helped me get comfortable with the programs, their organization and work with the computer.” In 1956 he received his doctorate in physics. “And, gradually,” he added, “I was more interested in the computer than the task itself.”

With all his colleagues, Corbato encouraged the gradual development and implementation of software - much like today is promoted in the popular programming approach called agile development methodology [agile methods].

“Corby taught us how to paint an ideal system, see how you can implement as much of it as possible taking into account the limitations, and then update our understanding of the ideal,” said Tom van Wleck, an IT specialist who worked with Corbato in the 1960s.

In the process of improving time-sharing systems in the 1960s, Corbato came up with another novelty: a computer password. CTSS gave each user their own set of files, however, since at first there were no username and password systems, each user could study the files of everyone else.

“Enabling the password system for each individual user as a data lock seemed a very straightforward decision,” Corbato said in an interview with Wired magazine in 2012. CTSS passwords are considered one of the very first computer security mechanisms.


More modern photo of Corbato. He worked at MIT throughout his career.

In 1990, Corbato received the Turing Prize , considered the computer equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

He met Isabelle Blandford, a programmer, in the early 1960s, and in 1962 they got married. She died in 1973.

Corbato's second wife, Emily (Gluck) Corbato survived him; and besides her, two daughters from her first marriage, Carolyn Corbato Stone and Nancy Corbato; two adoptive sons, David Guiche and Jason Guiche; brother Charles Corbato, and five grandchildren.

Corbato's penchant for finding errors in tasks has spread beyond computer systems. In 1974, shortly after meeting her second wife, a pianist, Corbato attended a concert dedicated to one of the composers at which she performed. “After he asked me why, despite the fact that I had been training hard to perform the work for so long and hard, did it still contain errors? Said Mrs. Corbato. “That fully characterized him.”

“It was an intellectual question,” van Vleck said. - He asked: What is the process that allows errors to appear after such a long practice, and what do you need to do? Maybe increase the font of notes? Improve lighting? Enlarge the piano keys? "