Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford
Douglas Crockford at the "Browser Wars: Episode II Attack of the DOMs" event on 2007-02-28
Born	1955 (age 61–62) Minnesota
Alma mater	San Francisco State University
Occupation	Senior JavaScript Architect
Employer	PayPal
Known for	JavaScript Object Notation
Website	crockford.com

Douglas Crockford is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who is best known for his ongoing involvement in the development of the JavaScript language, for having popularized the data format JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), and for developing various JavaScript related tools such as JSLint and JSMin. He is currently a senior JavaScript architect at PayPal, and is also a writer and speaker on JavaScript, JSON, and related web technologies.

Crockford earned a degree in Radio and Television from San Francisco State University in 1975. He took classes in FORTRAN and worked with a university lab's computer.

Crockford purchased an Atari 8-bit computer in 1980 and wrote the game Galahad and the Holy Grail for the Atari Program Exchange (APX), which resulted in Chris Crawford hiring him at Atari, Inc. While at Atari, Crockford wrote another game, Burgers!, for APX and a number of experimental audio/visual demos that were freely distributed.

After Warner Communications sold the company he joined National Semiconductor. In 1984 Crockford joined Lucasfilm, and later Paramount Pictures. He became known on video game oriented listservs in the early 1990s after he posted his memoir "The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion" to a videogaming bulletin board. The memoir documented his efforts to censor the computer game Maniac Mansion to Nintendo's satisfaction so that they could release it as a cartridge, and Crockford's mounting frustrations as Nintendo's demands became more obscure and confusing.