Google on Monday honoured computer scientist Michael Dertouzos, who foresaw the impact of the internet and predicted the popularity of personal computers, helping to maximize their potential.
The doodle, released on his 82nd birth anniversary, shows the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor holding a chalk against the backdrop of a board and surrounded by images of computers and visuals representing the internet.
Dertouzos was born to a concert pianist and an admiral in the Greek navy in Athens in 1936. He attended the University of Arkansas on a Fulbright Scholarship and earned a PhD from MIT. Dertouzos was a professor at MIT’s departments of electrical engineering and computer science and served as director of the institute’s Laboratory of Computer Science between 1974 and 2001.
He authored What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives and The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us. “If we strip the hype away, a simple, crisp and inevitable picture emerges – of an information marketplace where people and their computers will buy, sell and freely exchange information and information work,” Dertouzos had written. He died in 2001.
The computer scientist had contributed to make the Laboratory for Computer Science the North American home of the World Wide Web Consortium, a collaboration of companies promoting the web’s evolution and interconnectivity. Dertouzos had hired Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, to run it.
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