Fernando Corbató

Photo by Jason Dorfman.

Fernando Corbató is a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems.¹ In 1961, he initiated and developed the initial version of the Compatible Time-Sharing Systemat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The CTSS experience influenced the creation of Project MAC, where Corbató and his MIT colleagues developed the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) time-sharing system in collaboration with General Electric and initially Bell Telephone Laboratories.

David Walden:

Please tell me a bit about your early years.

Fernando Corbató:

My parents met in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where they were both graduate students in the Department of Spanish. My father was born in Spain, and my mother, with a Danish-American background, was born in San Francisco. I was born in nearby Oakland after my mother had gotten her masters' degree and while my father was finishing up his doctorate.

After my father got his PhD, he took a position on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which was then just moving from its initial downtown campus to its present campus in Westwood. We lived in Westwood, and I went to a pretty standard set of good public schools.

I entered University High School (UniHi) in the fall of 1941, and in December 1941, the US was catapulted into World War II by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As a result, UniHi went into extended sessions so some of the students could enter the labor force and work part time while still attending the necessary subjects to graduate. I instead took it as an opportunity to take extra subjects, especially math and science courses, and graduated early in September 1943 so that I could enter UCLA in the fall of 1943.

In the spring of 1944, after about seven months of college, I met a US Navy recruiter who briefed me on an opportunity to join the Navy and entering the year-long Eddy Program (named after the Commander who proposed it). The Navy was faced with a deluge of electronic equipment aboard the ships in its fleet (such as radar, sonar, and fire-control computers) and had initiated a year-long program to train enlisted men to maintain the novel hi-tech electronic gear in the fleet.

I faced the prospect of being drafted as soon as I turned 18 in the summer of 1944, so the chance to join the Navy and enter the Eddy Program looked like a real opportunity. I enlisted in May 1944 and quickly was off to boot camp.

Walden:

Tell me about your Navy service.

Corbató:

My recollection is that it was about four weeks of boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago. Then there was a month of "pre-radio" in Chicago where we learned elementary stuff to get everyone up to speed. Next we went to Monterey, California, for three months to the site of what is now the Naval Postgraduate School for further basic preparation. And finally, we spent six months at Treasure Island between San Francisco and Oakland, where we had an intensive course focusing on the various pieces of electronic equipment, mostly radar, but a little LORAN and a few other things that were deployed in the fleet. The theory was modest and mostly heuristics, not explanations.

After finishing my year of training, I went on to my only assignment in the Navy, which was to be part of the precommissioning crew of the USS Shenandoah, a destroyer tender. We spent three months in Tacoma, Washington, mostly loading supplies. One week before

Background of Fernando Corbató

Born: 1 July 1926, Oakland, California

Education: California Institute of Technology, BS (physics), 1950; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD (physics), 1956.

Professional Experience: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956 to present.

Honors and Awards: IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace Mc Dowell Award, 1966; American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow, 1975; IEEE Fellow, 1975; National Academy of Engineering member, 1976; American Federation of Information Processing Societies Harry Goode Memorial Award, 1980; American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, 1982; IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award...