Computer password inventor Fernando Corbató passes away

  • In News
  • July 14, 2019

Fernando Corbató, whose work on computer time-sharing in the 1960s helped pave the way for the personal computer, as well as the computer password, died at a nursing home in Newburyport, Mass. He was 93. His wife, Emily Corbató, said the cause was complications of diabetes. At his death he was a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Corbató, who spent his entire career at M.I.T., oversaw a project in the early 1960s called the Compatible Time-Sharing System, or C.T.S.S., which allowed multiple users in different locations to access a single computer simultaneously through telephone lines.

In 1990, Dr. Corbató received the A. M. Turing Award, widely considered the computing field’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He met Isabel Blandford, a computer programmer, in the early 1960s, and they married in 1962. She died in 1973.


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