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by Scobleizer 2309 days ago
Two tech legends left us this week: Larry Tesler and Bert Sutherland. Both played key roles at PARC, the research center Xerox started that sparked large chunks of what we use today.

Regarding Tesler: I sat next to him when I flew back from interviewing at Microsoft. He was in the last row on the plane. I saw his Blackberry, assumed he was a nerd. He had just left Apple, was on the committee that hired Steve Jobs. He had his fingers in so much of the tech that we use today from object oriented programming to the Newton that set the stage for the iPhone.

Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the tech of microprocessors, the Smalltalk and Java programming languages, and much more.

Huge losses for our industry.

1 comments

Also Peter Montgomery.

Legend in cryptography who created many algorithms for fast and secure elliptic curve cryptography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematicia...

Yes. I discovered Montgomery Multiplication from the book Hacker's Delight. Potentially very useful for me.

Yesterday I looked at the wiki page for that, followed the link to Peter Montgomery's wiki page, and thought I'd send him a little thank-you just for that (I had no idea of his crypto work, none at all). Then I noticed he had died that very day, yesterday, Feb 18th 2020, age 72. I wish I'd just been able to send him that little thank-you. I missed that window by a few hours.

Keep studying for him, cheers