Malcolm McIlroy

Updated: 05/02/2021 by Computer Hope
Malcolm McIlroy

Name: Malcolm (Doug) Douglas McIlroy

Born: 1932

Computer-related contributions

  • Mathematician, engineer, and programmer known for Unix pipelines, software componentry, and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak and tr.
  • Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College.
  • Pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product-line engineering.
  • Joined Bell Laboratories in 1958. From 1965-1986, he was head of the Computing Techniques Research Department, where the Unix operating system was developed.

Honors and awards

  • Won both the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") and its Software Tools award.
  • Served as national lecturer for ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
  • Turing Award chairman.
  • Associate editor for the Communications of the ACM.
  • Member of executive committee of CSNET.
  • Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs.

Quotes

"The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code."

"As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow."

Websites

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