Who was Michael Dertouzos?
Everything You need to know about professor Michael Dertouzos.
He was a computer scientist who foresaw how the internet would impact the lives of everyday
people, Dertouzos predicted the popularity of personal computers and helped to maximize
their potential as director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for
Computer Science.
Born in Athens, Greece on this day in 1936, Dertouzos was the son of a concert pianist
and an admiral in the Greek navy.
Upon graduation from Athens College, he attended the University of Arkansas on a Fulbright
Scholarship and earned a Ph.D. from MIT, joining the faculty in 1968.
Under Dertouzos' guidance, the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science grew into a thriving
research center employing hundreds of people collaborating on innovations like distributed
systems, time-sharing computers, the ArpaNet, and RSA encryption, an algorithm used to ensure
secure data transmission.
Dertouzos worked to make LCS the North American home of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
an alliance of companies promoting the Web's evolution and interconnectivity.
Dertouzos recruited Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, to run
it.
As early as 1980, Dertouzos was writing about "The Information Marketplace" a concept
that he expanded on in his book 1997 book What Will Be: How the New World of Information
Will Change Our Lives.
"If we strip the hype away," he observed, "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."
Insisting on the importance of bringing "technology into our lives, and not vice versa," Dertouzos
spurred LCS to head up the 1999 Oxygen project in partnership with MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Lab.
The goal of this massive project was to make computers "as natural a part of our environment
as the air we breathe."
As reflected in the title of his final book, The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered
Computers and What They Can Do For Us, Dertouzos' belief in technology was always grounded in
his desire to unleash the full potential of humanity.





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