Computer science pioneer Niklaus Wirth passes away
Wirth was born on 15 February 1934, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1959, a Master of Science in 1960, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering in Computer Science in 1963. From 1963 to 1967 he served as Assistant Professor at Stamford University's Computer Science department, then Professor of Informatics at ETH Zurich until his retirement in 1999. He took two one-year sabbaticals during that time to work at Xerox PARC.
Wirth is well-remembered for his pioneering work in programming languages and algorithms. For these achievements, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1984, inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 1994, and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2004.
They include, among many, being chief designer for the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1968), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007).
Hackaday:
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Remembering Niklaus Wirth: Father Of Pascal And Inspiration To Many
Although perhaps not as much of a household name as other pioneers of last century’s rapid evolution of computer hardware and the software running on them, Niklaus Wirth’s contributions puts him right along with other giants. Being a very familiar familiar face both in his native Switzerland at the ETH Zurich university – as well as at Stanford and other locations around the world where computer history was written – Niklaus not only gave us Pascal and Modula-2, but also inspired countless other languages as well as their developers.