A History of Silicon Valley
This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"
Biographies
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(Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi)
John McCarthy
John McCarthy (Boston, 1927) grew up on the road during the Great Depression
until his family settled in Los Angeles. After studying mathematics at
the California Institute of Technology, in 1951 he graduated in mathematics from
Princeton, where he met Marvin Minsky. He then joined the MIT in Boston.
In 1956 he organized
the first conference on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth College.
In 1958 he invented the programming language LISP.
In 1959 McCarthy and Minsky, who had joined the MIT in 1958, founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab.
When in 1963 the time-sharing system Project MAC (actually a laboratory) opened
at the MIT,
Marvin Minsky was appointed director but John McCarthy was its visionary.
In 1963 McCarthy moved to Stanford from the MIT, and in 1966 he opened the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) on the hills a few kilometers away from the campus. It became a West-Coast alternative to Project MAC.
History of Silicon Valley
| Biographies
| History pages
| Editor
| Correspondence
|