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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 21 2019, @09:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the met-his-endian dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

RIP Danny Cohen: The computer scientist who gave world endianness meets his end aged 81

The computer scientist who created the first visual flight simulator, gave us the compsci concept of endianness and whose pioneering work blazed a trail for modern VOIP services has died at the age of 81.

Dr Danny Cohen worked on one of the first ever computer-based flight simulations in the early 1970s, an era where most think of computing as something that was still reliant on punch cards instead of advanced graphics processing and display technologies.

In addition, Cohen gave us the compsci notion of endianness and developed some of the first clustered computing deployments – paving the way for modern cloud technology.

The flight simulator created by the Israeli-born mathematician is very basic by modern standards but wouldn't be bested by generally available software until the advent of home gaming consoles more than a decade later.

What made his flight sim achievements even more remarkable was that it wasn't until after he developed the simulator that Cohen learned to fly in real life, as he told Wired in a 2012 interview.

Cohen also carried out some early work on what he described as "digital voice teleconferencing" in 1978, as this Youtube video published from an account seemingly in Cohen's name sets out.

[...] The Internet Hall of Fame inducted him into their ranks in 2012, recognising him as a pioneer.

[...] Danny Cohen, computer scientist. 9 December 1937 – 12 August 2019.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:05PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:05PM (#883198) Journal

    Oh, I should mention that byte-sex marks were used for things sent over the network. Yes, there were some LANs that the p-System worked on. The best of that era was Corvus Omninet.

    Also there was a utility that could flip the byte sex of certain recognized binary file types, like executables, system libraries, etc.

    When building any file format or network format, a developer learned to put in byte-sex marks, and recognize them. Without needing to know the endianness of the system they are running on. In Pascal, you look at that marker (integer), if it is 1, no byte flipping is needed. If it is 256, bytes within words must be swapped. You could then be sure your compiled code (not just source) would run on any p-System. This was long before Java.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:55PM (#883246)

    I'm confused, you're no-sarcasm tag ended, so is this all sarcasm?