Robert
Fano, an electrical engineer who was instrumental in creating a world
of instantly responsive computers, died on July 13 in Naples, Fla. He
was 98.
His daughter Paola Nisonger confirmed his death.
As
a pioneering computer designer at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Mr. Fano made fundamental theoretical advances, both in the
ways computers handled information and in the design of interactive
software that made it possible for the machines to support many
simultaneous users.
Building
on the idea of shared computing proposed in 1961 by John McCarthy, an
artificial intelligence researcher, Dr. Fano collaborated with another
electrical engineer, Fernando J. Corbato, to develop the first
time-sharing computer operating system, known as Compatible Time-Sharing
System, or CTSS, to run on an IBM computer.
Before
the advent of time-sharing, computers were largely walled off from
users in glass rooms. Programs were run sequentially, submitted in decks
of punched cards. Users then returned later — often one or two days —
to receive the output as printouts.
The
system was notoriously frustrating, Dr. Fano recalled in a 1985
lecture: “If you misplaced a comma in any program, well, those two days
were gone!”
CTSS
marked a fundamental shift leading to a more interactive computing
world in which users worked at individual terminals. It also soon led to
Project MAC, an M.I.T. computation center for which Dr. Fano was the
founding director in 1963. It ushered in a world where computing
influenced a wide range of new ideas, ultimately including personal
computing.
Initially financed by the psychologist J. C. R. Licklider,
who was then directing the Information Processing Techniques Office at
the Advanced Research Projects Office at the Pentagon, Project MAC stood
for both Multiple Access Computing and Machine Aided Cognition. It was
part of an early wave of computing research focused on the idea of a
“man-computer symbiosis” that Dr. Licklider proposed in an influential
paper in 1960.
Dr. Fano recalled picking up the challenge because no one else stepped forward.
“At
a certain point, I decided if nobody was ready to get the ball rolling,
I was going to do it, although my experience with computers was close
to nil,” he said in an interview with the filmmaker Errol Morris.
He said the project also helped establish the field of computer science apart from electrical engineering.
Project
MAC would lead to a proliferation of new ideas in computing and
artificial intelligence research. One crucial component was the
simultaneous development of the Multics operating system — a joint effort of M.I.T. and corporations such as General Electric and Bell Labs, under the auspices of Project MAC.
“The
whole concept of Multics was going to be something that revolutionized
the way people used computers in a way that was humanistic and
friendly,” said Peter Neumann, a computer scientist who was then a Bell
Labs researcher who participated in the project.
Project
MAC was also significant in training a generation of technologists who
would spread ideas far beyond the insular community of hackers who built
the original system.
Two
of the early Project MAC designers were Daniel Bricklin and Robert
Frankston, M.I.T. students who went on to develop the Visicalc
spreadsheet program, which was instrumental in bringing personal
computing to the business world.
Mr.
Frankston recalled that Dr. Fano was interested in the social aspect of
computing. “The Multics project was about interactive computing, which
kept people involved,” he said. “Contrast that with Google’s goal of a
driverless car with people reduced to being passengers.”
Computing
was one of several fields Dr. Fano pursued. His interest in information
theory was piqued one day in 1948 as a young professor of electrical
engineering at M.I.T., when Norbert Weiner, a mathematician who coined
the term cybernetics, poked his head into Dr. Fano’s office and said
cryptically: “You know, information is entropy.”
That
started Dr. Fano on a long meditation and ultimately led to a
collaboration with a Bell Laboratories mathematician and electrical
engineer, Claude Shannon, also a pioneer in the field of information
theory, on new approaches to data compression. The ideas were further
evolved by one of Dr. Fano’s students, David A. Huffman, who developed a way to compress data without losing information.
Robert
Mario Fano was born in Turin, Italy, on Nov. 11, 1917. He was a student
at the School of Engineering of Torino in 1939 when his family was
forced to move to the United States in the face of Mussolini’s
anti-Jewish legislation.
After
getting his undergraduate degree at M.I.T., he worked briefly at
General Motors, supervising operators of welding machines, but he
quickly returned to graduate studies at M.I.T. During World War II,
he joined the Radiation Laboratory there and was involved in the
development of microwave radar. He spent a decade in information theory
before turning his attention to computing.
Besides his daughter Paola, Dr. Fano is survived by two other daughters, Linda Ryan and Carol Fano, and five grandchildren.
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