Fernando (Corby) J. Corbato

Pioneer in the development of general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, Corbató received the ACM Turing Award in 1990 for these foundational contributions.

Fernando (Corby) J. Corbató was born on July 1, 1926, in Oakland, California. He grew up during the Great Depression and developed an early interest in science and technology. He served in the United States Navy during World War II before pursuing his academic studies.

Corbató earned his bachelor's degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1950 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. He joined MIT's Computation Center shortly after completing his doctorate. He would spend virtually his entire career at MIT, becoming one of its most celebrated faculty members.

At MIT, Corbató became the principal architect of CTSS—the Compatible Time-Sharing System—developed in the early 1960s. This groundbreaking system demonstrated that multiple users could share a single mainframe computer simultaneously, a concept that transformed how people interacted with computers. Corbató then led the development of Multics, a far more ambitious time-sharing project undertaken in collaboration with Bell Labs and General Electric. Multics introduced numerous innovations in operating system design that influenced virtually every major operating system that followed, including Unix.

He is sometimes called the father of time-sharing for his foundational contributions to the field. Corbató also received credit for introducing the use of passwords to protect individual user accounts on shared computer systems. His influence on modern computing infrastructure proved profound and lasting.

He served as a professor at MIT for decades, mentoring generations of computer scientists. Fernando (Corby) J. Corbató died on July 12, 2019, in Newburyport, Massachusetts.