JohnMcCarthy died on 2011-10-23. He is most well-known for his ideas behind symbolic programming and Lisp. Spending only a few years at MIT, he would inspire the ideas behind ProjectMac started there by MarvinMinsky? and others. The Lisp language would become a veritable force in artificial intelligence research. MacLisp was developed at MIT and would later directly influence CommonLisp, Scheme and EmacsLisp.
McCarthy began the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) developing a timesharing operating system on the PDP-1. Later, it would see its own editor for the system, called E. In 1976, RichardStallman visited SAIL and was impressed by the editor’s features. He returned to MIT and implemented realtime editing in TECO. This and other features would also later be incorporated in Emacs.
JamieZawinski has passed along an XEmacs-related story about jmc.