Douglas McIlroy

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Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2006 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College.

Dr. McIlroy is best known for having invented:

The pipes and filters architecture of Unix as seen in the Unix pipeline implementation.

The entire concept of software componentry

Several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.

[edit] Career and honors

Dr. McIlroy earned his Bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1954, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1959 for his thesis On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1958, from 1965-1986 was head of its Computing Techniques Research Department (the birthplace of the Unix operating system), and thereafter was Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. He retired from Bell Labs in 1997.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has won both the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") and its Software Tools award. He has previously served the Association for Computing Machinery as national lecturer, Turing Award chairman, member of the publications planning committee, and associate editor for the Communications of the ACM, the Journal of the ACM, and ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. He also served on the executive committee of CSNET.