Daniel L. Murphy is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

notable for his involvement in the development of TECO (an early text editor and programming language), the operating systems TENEX and

TOPS-20 The TOPS-20 operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) is a proprietary OS used on some of DEC's 36-bit mainframe computers. The Hardware Reference Manual was described as for "DECsystem-10/DECSYSTEM-20 Processor" (meaning the DEC PDP- ...

, and

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

Biography

Murphy attended

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

from 1961 and graduated in 1965. In 1962 he created the text editor

Text Editor and Corrector TECO (), short for ''Text Editor & Corrector'',"A powerful and sophisticated text editor, TECO (Text Editor and Corrector) ... is both a character-oriented text editor and a programming language, that was developed in 1962 for use on Digital Equip ...

(TECO), later implemented on most of the PDP computers. He also developed a simple software

demand paging In computer operating systems, demand paging (as opposed to anticipatory paging) is a method of virtual memory management. In a system that uses demand paging, the operating system copies a disk page into physical memory only if an attempt is mad ...

system in software for the PDP-1 while at MIT. Murphy joined

Bolt, Beranek and Newman Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown ...

BBN in 1965. There he used an SDS 940 computer running the

Berkeley Timesharing System The Berkeley Timesharing System was a pioneering time-sharing operating system implemented between 1964 and 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley. It was designed as part of Project Genie and marketed by Scientific Data Systems for the S ...

, which provided page

memory management Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when ...

in hardware. When the

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

was announced, he was one of the architects of the TENEX operating system developed for the custom paging hardware designed at BBN. As part of the development of TENEX, Murphy and

Ray Tomlinson Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) was an American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971; It was the first system able to send mail be ...

wrote the original

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

program. In October 1972, he joined

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

where he first worked as a contractor porting TENEX to the KI10 model of the PDP-10 family. On January 2, 1973, he joined DEC as an employee, heading the team responsible for the development of the

operating system, an evolution of TENEX for the newer models of the PDP-10 family. TOPS-20 was first marketed in 1976 on the

DECSYSTEM-20 The DECSYSTEM-20 was a 36-bit Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe computer running the TOPS-20 operating system (products introduced in 1977). PDP-10 computers running the TOPS-10 operating system were labeled ''DECsystem-10'' as a ...

References

External links

Daniel Murphy's Homepage

TECO, TENEX, and TOPS-20 Papers and Pictures
Living people American computer scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Year of birth missing (living people) {{digital-typography-stub

Biography

References

Further reading

External links