Warren Teitelman (1941 – August 12, 2013) was an American computer scientist known for his work on programming environments and the invention and first implementation of concepts including
Undo / Redo, spelling correction, advising, online help, and
DWIM DWIM (do what I mean) computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users' explicit but potentially incorrect input.
Software
The term was coined by Warren Teit ...
''(Do What I Mean)''.
Early career and ARPANET
Warren Teitelman presented a novel scheme for real time character recognition in his master's thesis submitted in 1966 at
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 ...
. A rectangle, in which a character is to be drawn, is divided into two parts, one shaded and the other unshaded. Using this division a computer converts characters into ternary vectors (a list composed of 3 values: 0, 1, or −) in the following way. If a pen enters the shaded region, a 1 is added to the vector. When the unshaded region is entered, a 0 is appended. The thesis continued to be cited for several decades after its submission.
He started as
ARPA Principal Investigator from 1968 to 1978, and was responsible for the design and development of
BBN LISP at
Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, developing the idea of a programming system for a personal computer. He used 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 networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
to support users of BBN Lisp at
Stanford
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 considere ...
,
SRI
Shri (; , ) is a Sanskrit term denoting resplendence, wealth and prosperity, primarily used as an honorific.
The word is widely used in South and Southeast Asian languages such as Marathi, Malay (including Indonesian and Malaysian), Javanes ...
,
USC
USC most often refers to:
* University of South Carolina, a public research university
** University of South Carolina System, the main university and its satellite campuses
**South Carolina Gamecocks, the school athletic program
* University of ...
, and
CMU in 1970, and has been named an official ''ARPANET Pioneer'', for his contributions to its development and growth. He developed a ''Programmer's Assistant'' as part of BBN-LISP, which was one of the first with an "
Undo
Undo is an interaction technique which is implemented in many computer programs. It erases the last change done to the document, reverting it to an older state. In some more advanced programs, such as graphic processing, undo will negate the las ...
" function, by 1971. He developed a program on the
SDS 940 for
Bob Kahn
Robert Elliot Kahn (born December 23, 1938) is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the hea ...
that allowed experimentation with various routing policies in order to see the effect on network traffic and real time monitoring of the packets.
Interlisp and D-Lisp
He worked as Senior Scientist 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 ...
from 1972 until 1984; during this time he designed
Interlisp
Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, ...
.
Bill Joy
William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at ...
has acknowledged that many of the ideas in the
C shell
The C shell (csh or the improved version, tcsh) is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been widely distributed, beginning with the 2BSD release of the ...
were inspired by and copied from Interlisp. In Interlisp, Teitelman invented
DWIM DWIM (do what I mean) computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users' explicit but potentially incorrect input.
Software
The term was coined by Warren Teit ...
("Do What I Mean"), a function that attempted to correct many common typing errors. It was a package of Lisp routines which would "correct errors automatically or with minor user intervention"—thus making the code do what the user meant, not what they wrote.
[Warren Teitelman, "Toward a programming laboratory", in J. N. Buxton and ]Brian Randell
Brian Randell (born 1936) is a British computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor at the School of Computing, Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He specialises in research into software fault tolerance and dependability, and is a noted auth ...
, ''Software Engineering Techniques'', April 1970, a report on a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Rome, Italy, 27–31 October 1969, p. 108''ff''. The program was developed based upon Teitelman's own writing style and idiosyncrasies in 1972, and then used by other individuals in his office, followed by users across the industry.
In 1977, he and
Bob Sproull
Robert Fletcher "Bob" Sproull (born c. 1945) is an American computer scientist, who worked for Oracle Corporation where he was director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is currently an adjunct professor at the College of Informat ...
implemented the first
client–server window system
In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm for ...
,
D-Lisp. D-Lisp used the
Alto
The musical term alto, meaning "high" in Italian (Latin: ''altus''), historically refers to the contrapuntal part higher than the tenor and its associated vocal range. In 4-part voice leading alto is the second-highest part, sung in choruses by ...
as a display device on which ran the
window manager
A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...
and
event handler
In programming and software design, an event is an action or occurrence recognized by software, often originating asynchronously from the external environment, that may be handled by the software. Computer events can be generated or triggered ...
, communicating with Interlisp running on a MAXC (a
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 ...
clone). This system pioneered such concepts as overlapping windows where the window containing the focus did not have to be on top to receive events, on-line contextual help, and the ability to cut, copy, and paste from previous commands given to the shell.
Other research
He joined the
Cedar
Cedar may refer to:
Trees and plants
*''Cedrus'', common English name cedar, an Old-World genus of coniferous trees in the plant family Pinaceae
*Cedar (plant), a list of trees and plants known as cedar
Places United States
* Cedar, Arizona
* ...
project in 1980 and did research in strongly typed languages, and to make sure the Cedar Programming Environment benefited from some of the lessons of Interlisp. His paper “A Tour Through Cedar” was widely published, quoted, and even translated into several languages. The eponymous Teitelman Principle says that if a person requests a feature be added to a program, do not add the feature but find a way to make it easier for a programmer to add the feature themself. Teitelman was also an early proponent of the use of email as a multi-tasking feature of the modern computer.
He joined
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 1984 and became Sun’s first Distinguished Engineer in 1986. He was also a Director of Multi-Media at Sun until his departure in 1992. He further worked as Director of Programming Environments for
Rational Software
Rational Machines is an enterprise founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development. It changed its ...
and also with
Lucid Inc.
Lucid Incorporated was a Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, California-based computer software development company. Founded by Richard P. Gabriel in 1984, it went bankrupt in 1994.
History
The first CEO was Tony Slocum, formerly of IntelliCorp ...
and
Caere Corporation
Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software.
Nu ...
. He was one of founders of a startup called BayStone Software that developed
CRM (Customer Relations Management) software based on Action Request system from
Remedy Corp
Remedy Corporation was a software company that produced the Action Request System and various applications therein. It is one of the biggest and oldest names in ITSM software. Remedy is now the Service Management Business Unit of BMC Software.
H ...
oration. He invented the idea of Business Rules, which were data elements, rather than code, that embodied much of the business process. Remedy acquired BayStone in 1998 and he held the position of Chief Scientist of the CRM Business unit at Remedy. He joined
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
in 2003.
Publications
* ''A Display-Oriented Programmer’s Assistant'' was presented at
IJCAI The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) is the leading conference in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The conference series has been organized by the nonprofit IJCAI Organization since 1969, making it the oldest p ...
77. A film showing a demonstration of D-Lisp ran continuously at the conference.
* Warren Teitelman, Larry Masinter. ''The Interlisp Programming Environment''.
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...
Computer, April 1981.
*
* ''PILOT: A Step Toward Man-Computer Symbiosis'', September 1966
Awards
* He was awarded the
ACM Software System Award for inventing
Interlisp
Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, ...
and pioneering work in programming environments in 1992.
[
]
References
External links
List of Publications on Scientific Commons
{{DEFAULTSORT:Teitelman, Warren
Google employees
Businesspeople in software
American computer businesspeople
Silicon Valley people
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
1941 births
2013 deaths
Scientists at PARC (company)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Lisp (programming language) people