Jürg Gutknecht (born 3 January 1949 in

Bülach Bülach () is an historic town and a municipality in Switzerland in the canton of Zürich. It is the administrative capital of Bülach district. It is situated in the Glatt Valley (German: ''Glattal'') to the east of the small river Glatt and ...

) is a Swiss

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 (a ...

. He developed, with

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally ...

, the programming language Oberon and the corresponding operating system Oberon.

Biography

Jürg Gutknecht was full professor in the computer science department at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule ( ETH Zurich) until April 2014. From 1967 to 1970, he was a member of the

real-time computing Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constra ...

system programming group at Swissair. Then he studied mathematics at the ETH and worked in parallel at International Business Machines ( IBM) as a student employee. In 1978, he received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in mathematics. He joined

's research team in 1981, working on the Lilith computer and

Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It ...

. After a

sabbatical A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work. The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Biblical practice of ''shmita'' (sabbatical year), which is related to agriculture. According to ...

at PARC in 1984–1985, he developed, conjointly with Wirth, the Oberon operating system based on the Oberon language. Out of print
PDF (4'398 KB)
With Peter Schweri, he developed the system ''Sakkara'' for the purpose of writing partiturs of typical constructive Peter-Schweri-art compositions for presentation on computer and internet. In 2013, Gutknecht released another Oberon-style programming language, named

Zonnon Zonnon is a general purpose programming language in the line or family of the preceding languages Pascal, Modula, and Oberon. Jürg Gutknecht is the author. Its conceptual model is based on objects, definitions, implementations, and modules. ...

Publications

External links

Gutknecht personal webpage

ETHZ Who's who
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gutknecht, Jurg Swiss computer scientists ETH Zurich faculty Living people 1949 births People from Bülach