Stephen C. Johnson

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Stephen Curtis Johnson spent nearly 20 years at Bell Labs and AT&T, where he wrote Yacc, Lint, and the Portable C Compiler.

Steve earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics, but has spent his entire career in computing. He has worked on topics as diverse as computer music, psychometrics, and VLSI design, but he is best known for his work on Unix tools, and the first AT&T UNIX port. He also ran the UNIX System V language development department for several years in the mid-1980s. In 1986 he went to Silicon Valley, where he was part of a half-dozen or so startup companies, including Transmeta. In 2002, he joined MathWorks to work on the MATLAB programming language.

Steve has served on the USENIX board for ten years, four of those as president, and is now the USENIX representative to the Computing Research Association.

His famous epigram is often quoted: "Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach".^[1]