page_title: Alan Kotok
section_title: Digital: 1962–96
hierarchical_section_title: Alan Kotok / Digital: 1962–96
caption_attribution_description: English: DEC PDP-6. Gordon Bell and Alan Kotok at PDP-6. Español: Gordon Bell y Alan Kotok en una PDP-6 Deutsch: Gordon Bell und Alan Kotok an einer PDP-6
context_page_description: Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium. Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the first true hackers.
  Kotok was a precocious child who skipped two grades before college. At MIT he became a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club, and after enrolling in MIT's first freshman programming class, he helped develop some of the earliest computer software including a digital audio program and what is sometimes called the first video game. Together with his teacher John McCarthy and other classmates, he was part of the team that wrote the Kotok-McCarthy program which took part in the first chess match between computers.
  After leaving MIT, Kotok joined the computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation, where he worked for over 30 years. He was the chief architect of the PDP-10 family of computers, and created the company's Internet Business Group, responsible for several forms of Web-based technology including the first popular search engine.
context_section_description: After graduating from MIT, Kotok started at Digital Equipment Corporation as one of the company's first few dozen employees; in his 34-year career with the company, he held senior engineering positions in storage, telecommunications and software.
  He began in 1962 by writing a Fortran compiler for the PDP-4, before contributing to the development of the PDP-5 instruction set. Under Harlan Anderson (vice president of engineering), principal architect Gordon Bell led a team, including Kotok as an assistant logic designer, which developed the first commercial time-sharing computer, the PDP-6, designed and delivered in 1963–1964. Aiming at a scientific market, Digital machines had a 36-bit word length to accommodate artificial intelligence work in Lisp and to compete with IBM mainframe computers. In 1965, in what may have been the first around-the-world networking connection, a PDP-6 at the University of Western Australia in Perth was operated from Boston in the United States via a telex link.
  Kotok became the principal architect and designer of several generations of the PDP-10, DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20.  Bell, Thomas Hastings, Richard Hill and Kotok wrote that the DECSystem-10 accelerated the transition from batch-processing to time-sharing and single-user systems. With Kotok as system architect, the VAX 8600 (known as Venus) was introduced in 1984 as the highest-performance computer in Digital's history to date, operating up to 4.2 times faster than the standard at the time.
  Kotok expanded his areas of expertise from engineering into teaching and business: following a suggestion of Berlekamp, he taught logic design at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1975–1976 academic year; he also earned a master's degree in business administration from Clark University in 1978, which prepared him for later work at Digital and W3C.
caption: Gordon Bell and Kotok at a PDP-6 in 1964
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