We’ve received direct word and noted on Twitter that that Mike Culbert, a longtime Apple hardware engineer, has passed away after battling cancer. According to his friends, he was a “brilliant engineer, a wonderful human being.” He will be missed. → Read More
In the annals of criticism it is often the case that a writer is cursed in life and forgotten in death. For Roger Ebert, voluminous historian of the cinema and its most astute critic, neither of these was the case. → Read More
Digital activist and early employee at Reddit, Aaron Swartz, committed suicide in New York on January 11. He was 26.
Swartz was a fiery proponent of Internet freedom and the founder of DemandProgress.org. He was a co-creator of the RSS 1.0 standard and was a co-founder at Reddit. He writes about his career here. → Read More
Donald J. Sobol, author of the acclaimed Encyclopedia Brown series of children’s mystery books, died last Wednesday of natural causes. He was 87.
The author released his first book in 1963 after receiving dozens of rejections. The series went on to sell millions of copies around the world and helped children become amateur sleuths, and, more important, taught them to question and quest through… → Read More
Author Ray Bradbury died today in Los Angeles. He was 91.
As a child of the pre-Internet, Bradbury’s writing was just on the apex between a grave, plastic future foreseen by Star Wars and the brushwork and filigree of the dreams and hopes of a previous century. Reading him was like reading a story written on a cave wall – true, indelible, and exceedingly strange. He wrote horror without being… → Read More
The CEO of Micron Technology, Steve Appleton, died in a small plane crash today in Boise, Idaho. He was 51.
Appleton worked at the company since 1983, starting on the night shift production line. He died piloting a Lancair experimental aircraft around Boise. → Read More
The creator of Lisp and arguably the father of modern artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, died last night. He studied mathematics with the famous John Nash at Princeton and, notably, held the first “computer-chess” match between scientists in the US and the USSR. He transmitted the moves by telegraph.
McCarthy believed AI should be interactive, allowing for a give and take similar to AI… → Read More
As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already… → Read More
Robert Morris, a security expert and father of Robert Tappan Morris, the creator of the Morris Worm, died near his home in Lebanon, N.H. of complications due to dementia.
Morris spent almost a decade as chief scientist for the National Security Agency and was instrumental in the first cyberattack against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army in 1991. Morris was also worked at building tools and systems for… → Read More
Strum out a few chords of Stairway, friends, because the guy who pioneered the solid-body electric guitar, Les Paul, is dead. He died of complications from pneumonia in White Plains, NY. Paul also invented multitrack recording, the process of playing and recording multiple tracks at once. This led to incredible – and decidedly mechanical – effects like echo and pitch shifting. → Read More
One of our own who has been having trouble killed himself and his wife in an apparent murder-suicide a few weeks ago.
Jason Montes, 33, shot himself and his wife Serena on January 11. Montes worked for Ultra Game Players and the Official Playstation Magazine before going into web consulting. → Read More
Steve Jobs’ passed away yesterday…at least that’s what Bloomberg stated by running his obituary a bit prematurely. It seems that someone was updating Jobs’ lifetime achievements and accidently posted the 17-page history out on the interweb. So no, the father of all that is Apple and good is still alive and kicking. This brings up a great thought though. The man is sick. → Read More
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