L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, ...

, a free software

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

and

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

interpreter. Deutsch's other work includes the

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

implementation that inspired

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

just-in-time compilation In computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation (also dynamic translation or run-time compilations) is a way of executing computer code that involves compilation during execution of a program (at run time) rather than before execution. This may cons ...

technology about 15 years later. Some stories about him are included in the Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution book.

Contributions to computer science

Deutsch wrote the

PDP-1 The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusetts ...

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

1.5 implementation and first REPL, Basic PDP-1 LISP, "while still in short pants" and finished it in 1963, when he was 17 years old. He collaborated with

Calvin Mooers Calvin Northrup Mooers (October 24, 1919 – December 1, 1994), was an American computer scientist known for his work in information retrieval and for the programming language TRAC. Early life Mooers was a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, atte ...

on the

TRAC Trac is an open-source software, open-source, web-based Project management software, project management and bug tracking system. It has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a bug tracking system for both free and open-source s ...

programming language and wrote its first implementation, on the PDP-1, in 1964.
full text
From 1964 to 1967, during his study at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, he worked with

Butler Lampson Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the ...

and

Charles P. Thacker Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker (February 26, 1943 – June 12, 2017) was an American pioneer computer designer. He designed the Xerox Alto, which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI). Biography Tha ...

on 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 became the standard

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

for the SDS 940 mainframe that would later be used by

Tymshare Tymshare, Inc (Matthew Heyer-Baker) was a time-sharing service and third-party hardware maintenance company competing with companies such as CompuServe, Service Bureau Corporation and National CSS. Tymshare developed or acquired various technolog ...

, NLS, and

Community Memory Community Memory (CM) was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store i ...

. Deutsch is the author of several

Request for Comments A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or g ...

(RFCs), The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing, and originated the

Deutsch limit The Deutsch limit is an aphorism about the information density of visual programming languages originated by L. Peter Deutsch that states: :The problem with visual programming is that you can’t have more than 50 visual primitives on the screen ...

adage about

visual programming language In computing, a visual programming language (visual programming system, VPL, or, VPS) is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements ''graphically'' rather than by specifying them ''textually''. A VP ...

s. Deutsch received a Ph.D. in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

from the

in 1973, and has previously worked at

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

and

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 1994, he was inducted as a

Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

Personal life

Deutsch's father was the physicist

Martin Deutsch Martin Deutsch (29 January 1917 – 16 August 2002) was an Austrian-American professor of physics at MIT. He is best known for being the discoverer of positronium. Early life Deutsch was born in Vienna during the First World War to a Jewish ...

, a professor at MIT. Deutsch changed his legal first name from "Laurence" to "L" on September 12, 2007. His published work and other public references before that time generally use the name ''L. Peter Deutsch'' (with a dot after the ''L''). After auditing undergraduate music courses at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, in January 2009, he entered the postgraduate music program at

California State University, East Bay California State University, East Bay (Cal State East Bay, CSU East Bay, or CSUEB) is a public university in Hayward, California. The university is part of the 23-campus California State University system and offers 136 undergraduate and 60 pos ...

, and was awarded a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...

(M.A.) in March 2011. As of mid-2011, he has had six compositions performed at public concerts, and now generally identifies himself as a composer rather than a software developer or engineer.

References

External links

L. Peter Deutsch's PIVOT program verification system (thesis and source code)
*RFCs authored or co-authored by L. Peter Deutsch: RFC 190, RFC 446, RFC 550, RFC 567, RFC 606, RFC 1950, RFC 1951 and RFC 1952 *
L Peter Deutsch's web page related to music, including link to scores and MIDI files
1946 births Free software programmers Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery University of California, Berkeley alumni Living people Scientists at PARC (company) {{US-compu-bio-stub