David Korn
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David Korn is an American computer programmer, who is probably best known for creating the Korn shell, a command line shell interface/programming language for UNIX-like systems.
David Korn received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1969. After working on computer simulations of transsonic air foils, he switched fields to computer science and became a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in 1976. He developed Korn shell in response to problems he and his colleagues had with the most commonly used shells at the time, Bourne shell and C shell. Korn shell is backward-compatible with Bourne shell, but takes a lot of ideas from C shell, such as history viewing and vi-like command line editing.
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[edit] Korn shell and Microsoft
Due to Korn shell being one of the more popular shells written for the UNIX Operating System, Microsoft decided to include a version of it produced by Mortice Kern Systems in a UNIX integration package for Windows NT. This version was not compatible with ksh88 (a Korn shell specification), and Korn mentioned this during a question and answer period of a Microsoft presentation during a USENIX NT conference in Seattle in 1997. Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager who was participating in the presentation, not knowing who the commenter was, insisted that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn shell. A polite debate ensued, with Sullivan continuing to insist that the man giving the criticisms was mistaken about the compatibility issues. Sullivan only backed down when an audience member stood up and mentioned that the man making the comments was David Korn.
[edit] Other software projects
Along with Korn shell, he is also known as the creator of UWIN, an X/Open library for Win32 systems, similar to Cygwin. Korn and Kiem-Phong Vo also codeveloped sfio, a library for managing I/O streams.
Korn became a Bell Labs fellow in 1984. He currently lives in New York City and works for AT&T Research in Florham Park, New Jersey.
[edit] Other David Korns
The Dave Korn who works on the just-mentioned Cygwin (which includes a version of the Korn shell) is not "the" David Korn. David will also sometimes be confused with people named David Korn outside of world of computer science. Some common misidentifications are with David Corn, the Washington-based author and editor of the Nation, as well as -- mostly in a humorous vein -- the drummer from the rock band KORN, David (Silveria). In an academic setting, other David Korns include Stanford University Medical School past dean and professor emiritus, Dr. David Korn, and Anderson University (South Carolina) Spanish professor Dr. David Korn. According to Internet sources, in the accounting world, there are a pair of individuals with the same name. One is David Korn, CPA, who is credited with contributing services to charitable organizations, and the other is David Korn, MBA, who received his degree in Taxation from Baruch College of the City University of New York.
