Jim Waldo is an American computer scientist and the Chief Technology Officer of

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. He is the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at the

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is the engineering school within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, offering degrees in engineering and applied sciences to graduate students admitted ...

and Professor of Technology and Policy at the

Harvard Kennedy School The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school offers master's degrees in public policy, public ...

. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at

Sun Microsystems Laboratories Oracle Labs (formerly Sun Microsystems Laboratories, or Sun Labs) is a research and development branch of Oracle Corporation. The labs were created when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Sun Labs was established in 1990 by Ivan Sutherland and R ...

, where he was lead architect for

Jini Jini (), also called Apache River, is a network architecture for the construction of distributed systems in the form of modular co-operating services. JavaSpaces is a part of the Jini. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems, Jini was released ...

, a distributed programming system based on Java, and helped develop

Project Darkstar Project Darkstar was an open-source MMOG middleware solution written in Java. Project Darkstar began as a personal project of Jeff Kesselman in 1999. It later became a research project at Sun Microsystems, and aimed to "help developers and ope ...

. He was also involved in some of the early design and development of the

Java programming language Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers ''write once, run anywh ...

and

environment Environment most often refers to: __NOTOC__ * Natural environment, all living and non-living things occurring naturally * Biophysical environment, the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism or ...

Biography

Jim Waldo graduated from the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

in 1973 with a BS in philosophy, in 1975 with an MA in linguistics, and in 1976 with an MA in philosophy. He then attended the

University of Massachusetts at Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

for his PhD in philosophy, and graduated in 1980. After a year-long academic position at

Hampshire College Hampshire College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was opened in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education, in association with four other colleges ...

, he joined a

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

as a programmer. He moved to

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo wa ...

in 1985 and stayed on when it got acquired by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

in 1989. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first

object request broker In distributed computing, an object request broker (ORB) is a middleware which allows program calls to be made from one computer to another via a computer network, providing location transparency through remote procedure calls. ORBs promote interop ...

, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first

CORBA The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sys ...

specification. He then moved to

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

in 1992. He left Sun in 2010 and after a year at VMWare, he joined Harvard University where he was named CTO in 2011.

Bibliography

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Waldo, Jim Living people American computer programmers University of Utah alumni University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts alumni John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty American computer scientists Sun Microsystems people Researchers in distributed computing Computer science writers Year of birth missing (living people) Harvard Kennedy School faculty