University Laboratory High School senior, Urbana IL, and University of Illinois sophomore
1973 LAN Gamer: dogfight on Plasma tube, email, chat (PLATO, U of I),
1973 Math and Science award (3000 grads/90 years, 3 Nobel Prizes, 1 Pulitzer)
1974 HS graduation
1976 U of Illinois, BA Economics
1980 rewrite of mesh network using upcalls from pdp-11 16-bit kernel
1983? 1st boot of our custom Unix on VAX 11/780 whiteboard under NDA
1984 SVR2 network mgr (kernel STREAMS, user TLI)
1985 SVR2.1 core mgr multi-core (two cpu board) support
1986 SVR3 core mgr (acquired via SunOS, modded VFS from Sun, NFS, symbolic links), MH /proc on a bug fix (better debugging, ask Roger Faulkner & Ron Gomes) e.g. caught SV up to SunOS
1988 SVR4phase1 (cooked up megamerged kernel 1:1 with Bill Joy of Sun), e.g. Solaris
1989 (abandoned) fizix, nano kernel with 10x procedure call IPC capability OS (better than L4)
1990 @protocol to ObjC - e.g. multiple inheritance of specification, e.g. inspired interfaces in Java (they had our source & kernel engineers by that point), also into C#
, e.g. the dominant OO model excluding the C++ affciocrazies
1991 first distributed objects with reference counting protocol
1991 synchronization free multiple reader, locked writer ObjC Hash Table algorithm (GC!)
1992 Lead Foundation Architect, with Bertrand and Ali; the OS Portability Layer (Task, Thread, Lock, RunLoop, Timers), Distributed Objects 7 class suite, Date/CalendarDate, the class cluster concept, including Set, Data, String, Dictionary, Array, HashTable, MapTable contributions, the "property list" concept (e.g. JSON), the Framework bundle of header files and library and resources, the archiving protocol, and of course the new memory model of +alloc-init-retain-release-autorelease-dealloc, and -copy (+1).
1993 PDO (my layer ported to Solaris, HPUX, ...) demo'ed on stage with lasers
1994 objc into kernel to help with Intel transition
1995 WebScript, an objc interpreter with Swift like absence of C pointers
1996 JavaBridge, and WebObjects mapping (IPO quality market share)
1996.12 Apple announces purchase of NeXT for OS
1996.12+2days put in charge of NeXT OS bringup on Apple
1997-2001 Java to replace ObjC, dual API frameworks, cancelled, added Shared Generation to HotSpot (tech lead did the work), faster launch, shared memory, Sun took it back!!
2001-2007 ObjC2: @synchronize, 0 cost @throw, @properties(attributes), Garbage Collection (__strong and zeroing __weak, to C as well), the for..in fast enumeration construct, ...
2009 ^Blocks (the 10.6 SnowLeapord performance win via GCD), 100s APIs
2010 ARC, the +1 etc. algebra, runtime support; __weak support via +alloc-init... protocol extension
2011 C11 _Atomic
2011 unleashed from Apple