Remembering John McCarthy

Not everyone in computers is a "sooner" such as myself.
I was very lucky to be certified in subject matter expertise in several critical areas as the result of inservice training with vendors during my career.

There are pedigreed individuals touting advanced degrees and academic accolades across the land. One such individual is the late John McCarthy. He was an American computer and cognitive scientist.

While I have extensive experience and utilized acquired skills with both common and Franz Lisp, I have never achieved any level of academic excellence toward that end.

He contributed to the founding of artificial intelligence and co-authored the document that coined that term "artificial intelligence" aka "AI".

He also developed the programming language family Lisp, influenced the design of the language ALGOL, and popularized time-sharing and and invented the automatic memory management in computers called "garbage collection".

He was born September 4, 1927 and died October 24, 2011.

As a computer scientist he founded the field of Artificial Intelligence.

John McCarthy pivotal figure in the field of artificial intelligence defining the discipline and establishing its first major research labs at MIT and Stanford.

He was awarded the Turing Award for his work, including the invention of the Lisp programming language and the concept of time-sharing, and his contributions shaped the course of AI research for decades, leading to developments like conversational AI and cloud computing.