Fernando José "Corby" Corbató (July 1, 1926 – July 12, 2019) was an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, notable as a pioneer in the development of

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

Career

Corbató was born on July 1, 1926, in

Oakland, California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...

, to Hermenegildo Corbató, a Spanish literature professor from

Villarreal Villarreal (officially, in ) is a city and municipality in the province of Castellón which is part of the Valencian Community in the east of Spain. The town is located at 42 m above sea level, 7 km to the south of the province's capital ( ...

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

, and Charlotte (Jensen) Corbató, a

Danish American Danish Americans () are Americans who have ancestral roots originated fully or partially from Denmark. There are approximately 1,300,000 Americans of Danish origin or descent. Most Danes who came to the United States after 1865 did so for e ...

. In 1930, the Corbató family moved to

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

for Hermenegildo's job at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

(UCLA). In 1943, Corbató enrolled at UCLA, but due to

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

he was recruited by the

Navy A navy, naval force, military maritime fleet, war navy, or maritime force is the military branch, branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval warfare, naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake-borne, riverine, littoral z ...

during his first year. During the war, Corbató "debug edan incredible array of equipment", inspiring his future career. Corbató left the Navy in 1946, enrolled at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

, and received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1950. He then earned a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1956. He joined MIT's Computation Center immediately upon graduation, became a professor in 1965, and stayed at MIT until he retired. The first time-sharing system he was associated with was known as the MIT

Compatible Time-Sharing System The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was the first general purpose time-sharing operating system. Compatible Time Sharing referred to time sharing which was compatible with batch processing; it could offer both time sharing and batch proce ...

(CTSS), an early version of which was demonstrated in 1961. Corbató is credited with the first use of

password A password, sometimes called a passcode, is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services t ...

s to secure access to files on a large computer system, though he later claimed that this rudimentary security method had proliferated and became unmanageable. The experience with developing CTSS led to a second project,

Multics Multics ("MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of t ...

, which was adopted by

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston. Over the year ...

for its high-end computer systems (later acquired by

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building automation, industrial automa ...

). Multics pioneered many concepts now used in modern operating systems, including a

hierarchical file system In computing, a hierarchical file system is a file system that uses directories to organize files into a tree structure. In a hierarchical file system, ''directories'' contain information about both files and other directories, called ''sub ...

, ring-oriented security,

access control list In computer security, an access-control list (ACL) is a list of permissions associated with a system resource (object or facility). An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to resources, as well as what operations are ...

s, single-level store,

dynamic linking In computing, a dynamic linker is the part of an operating system that loads and links the shared libraries needed by an executable when it is executed (at " run time"), by copying the content of libraries from persistent storage to RAM, fill ...

, and extensive on-line reconfiguration for reliable service. Multics, while not particularly commercially successful in itself, directly inspired

Ken Thompson Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B (programmi ...

to develop

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

, the direct descendants of which are still in extremely wide use; Unix also served as a direct model for many other subsequent operating system designs.

Awards

Among many awards, Corbató received the

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...

in 1990, "for his pioneering work in organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems". In 2012, he was made a Fellow of the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

"for his pioneering work on timesharing and the Multics operating system".

Legacy

Corbató is sometimes known for "Corbató's Law" which states: Corbató is recognized as helping to create the first computer password.

Personal life and death

Corbató married programmer Isabel Blandford in 1962; she died in 1973. Corbató had a second wife, Emily (née Gluck); two daughters, Carolyn Corbató Stone and Nancy Corbató, by his late wife Isabel; two step-sons, David Gish and Jason Gish; a brother, Charles; and five grandchildren. Corbató lived on Temple Street in West Newton, Massachusetts. He died on July 12, 2019, in

Newburyport, Massachusetts Newburyport is a coastal city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, northeast of Boston. The population was 18,289 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. A historic seaport with a vibrant tourism industry, Newburyport includes p ...

, at the age of 93 due to complications from

diabetes Diabetes mellitus, commonly known as diabetes, is a group of common endocrine diseases characterized by sustained high blood sugar levels. Diabetes is due to either the pancreas not producing enough of the hormone insulin, or the cells of th ...

Publications

* F. J. Corbató, M. M. Daggett, R. C. Daley,
An Experimental Time-Sharing System
' (IFIPS 1962) is a good description of CTSS * F. J. Corbató (editor),
The Compatible Time-Sharing System: A Programmer's Guide
' (M.I.T. Press, 1963) * F. J. Corbató, V. A. Vyssotsky

(

AFIPS The American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) was an umbrella organization of professional societies established on May 10, 1961, and dissolved in 1990. Its mission was to advance knowledge in the field of information scien ...

1965) is a good introduction to Multics * * F. J. Corbató, C. T. Clingen, J. H. Saltzer
''Multics -- The First Seven Years''
(AFIPS, 1972) is an excellent review, after a considerable period of use and improvement * F. J. Corbató, C. T. Clingen,

' ("Conference on Research Directions in Software Technology", Providence, Rhode Island, 1977) is a fascinating look at what it was like to manage such a large software project * F. J. Corbató,
On Building Systems That Will Fail
' (Turing Award Lecture, 1991) * F. J. Corbató,
A paging experiment with the Multics system
'. Included in a Festschrift published in honor of Prof. P.M. Morse. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969.

References

External links

Oral history interview with Fernando J. Corbató
at

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota. Corbató discusses computer science research, especially time-sharing, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Oral history interview with Fernando J. Corbató
at the

in Mountain View, CA. Fernando Corbató reviews his early educational and naval experiences in the Eddy program during World War II, including the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), Project MAC, and Multics.
Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing
documentary about the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

. Includes footage of Fernando Corbató. * , Corbato demonstrates MIT's

.
Corby
by

Tom Van Vleck Tom Van Vleck is an American computer software engineer. Life and work Van Vleck graduated from MIT in 1965 with a BS in Mathematics. He worked on CTSS at MIT, and co-authored its first email program with Noel Morris. In 1965, he joined Project ...

on the

website. A background sketch that includes many further links and several photographs. *
Corby Memorial
- Transcript of the memorial held at MIT.
Fernando J. Corbató (1926-2019)
Memorial Tribute of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

. {{DEFAULTSORT:Corbato, Fernando J. 1926 births 2019 deaths Turing Award laureates California Institute of Technology alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Multics people Time-sharing Writers from Oakland, California Military personnel from California American people of Spanish descent American people of Danish descent United States Navy personnel of World War II 1994 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery