Many brilliant mathematicians & researchers worked there, creating much of modern computer science. Professor John McCarthy [formerly with MIT] created the lab, staffed it, worked there, and taught graduate-level classes. John was a very influential AI pioneer. He famously invented / discovered LISP (List Processing Language) in 1955. Because of its almost total lack of syntax, it's naturally recursive. LISP source code structure is identical to LISP data. Everything is just a list – a string of delimited symbols bounded by parentheses. Lists can contain other lists, deeply nested. Since LISP code can modify itself by manipulating lists, it has an innate recursiveness – like the fundamental level of neuroplasticity. LISP became the programming language of choice for Artificial Intelligence research & development.
I was very lucky & privileged to take all of his classes. I learned LISP from John himself, along with other grad students [like Tesler] who also worked on projects at SAIL. The Lab had its own programming language, SAIL – Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language. It had an ALGOL-like syntax, and many features that later became ubiquitous, like Pieces of Glass (POGs) – the precursor to Windows. Invoking a Piece of Glass was equivalent to opening a new window, except that POGs were transparent not opaque.
Much of the TCP/IP Internet protocols were developed at SAIL [under DARPA research funding]. Chunking data into relatively small "packets" that could be transmitted asynchronously in any order, then stitched back together in correct sequence, was a fundamental building block of Internet communication.
Other luminaries at the Lab included Alan Kay, who created the [object-oriented] smalltalk programming language. He also essentially created the design for a portable, folding, personal computer; half keyboard, half screen. Alan became an Apple Fellow.
Whitfield Diffie worked on cryptography. He developed – along with Martin Hellman – the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange algorithm, using Elliptic Curve math to enable public-key cryptography [1976].
Ron Rivest is another Stanford Computer Science PhD & SAIL cryptographer alumnus, who is the R in RSA Security.
Similarly with Rodney Brooks, who worked on Robotics. He invented & produced the Roomba vacuum cleaner.
There was a continuing interchange of ideas among programmers at SAIL, Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center], & SRI [Stanford Research Institute]. Doug Englebart invented [1968] the mouse as a pointing & control device.
Perhaps the intellectual giant with the strongest claim to creating the pillars of modern computer science is Professor Don Knuth, author of the multi-volume Art of Computer Science. He is now Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Science. Stanford honored him with the distinguished Stanford Hero award [2011] for lifetime achievement.
Wow, I am impressed by what you wrote. Congratulations on having had a great career side by side with such luminaries.
Thank you. Very interesting and informative.
That said, ummm what?