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An Anonymous Coward writes:

MIT professor emeritus Robert Fano passed away [nytimes.com] a couple weeks ago at age 98. Fano was born and raised in Italy, but fled with his family at age 21 when Mussolini ramped up an anti-Jewish campaign similar to Hitler's. Arriving in the United States, he enrolled at MIT and quickly obtained a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. In 1944, after Italy had left the war, Fano was able to obtain a security clearance to join the MIT Radiation Lab as a researcher and designer of microwave components for radar systems. He obtained his doctorate degree after completing a thesis deriving an important theoretical result on bandwidth limitations for impedance matching [mit.edu]. He then branched into the nascent field of Information Theory, becoming one of the field's most prolific researchers. During this period Fano encouraged one of his students, David Huffman, to try to improve on the method Fano and Claude Shannon had independently developed to efficiently encode a string of characters; Huffman later admitted working on the problem fruitlessly for months [maa.org] until he had his A-ha! moment.

I found a lively and informative lecture Fano gave to students at MIT (1985) on the origin of time-sharing systems [youtube.com]; Fano describes the excitement of working in the new field of computing in the early 1960's. The first seven minutes are a capsule biography provided by the introducer. Fano brought in a deck of Hollerith cards to explain to the young audience what mainframe batch computing was, why it was a PITA, and why people would typically gather several inches of line printer output from each run. He traced to beginnings of time-sharing to online computing, done on Whirlwind computers at Lincoln Labs throughout the '50s, which used a reservation system where each user could have exclusive use of the machine for a period of time. (DEC founder Ken Olsen came out of Lincoln Labs).

In the lecture, Fano credits John McCarthy (creator of LISP) and Christopher Strachey (denotational semantics) for independently proposing time-shared use of the mainframe computers at universities. While this quickly captured the imagination of Fano and others in the MIT community (Fano makes the analogy of a distribution system for electrical power ), not everyone was in favor of the idea. Fano names some detractors: Richard Hamming, Eugene Amdahl, and Jay Forrester all thought it was an appalling waste of computer power to allow people to sit in front of a terminal trying to think what to do next. It's hard not to think of some of today's debates involving cloud computing.

Here's an interview with Fano [princeton.edu] in which he discusses his career.

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