Jochen Liedtke
| Jochen Liedtke | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
26 May 1953 Herford, Germany |
| Died | 10 June 2001 (aged 48) |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Computer science, Operating Systems |
| Institutions | GMD, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, University of Karlsruhe |
| Alma mater | Bielefeld University, Technical University of Berlin |
| Doctoral advisor | Prof Stefan Jähnichen |
| Doctoral students | Volkmar Uhlig, PhD Karlsruhe 2005; Uwe Dannowski, PhD Karlsruhe 2007 |
| Known for | L3 and L4 microkernel |
Jochen Liedtke (26 May 1953 – 10 June 2001) was a German computer scientist, noted for his work on microkernels, especially the creation of the L4 microkernel family.
In the mid-1970s Liedtke studied for a diploma degree in mathematics at the University of Bielefeld. His thesis project was to build a compiler for the ELAN programming language, which had been launched for teaching programming in German schools; the compiler was written in Elan itself. After his graduation in 1977, he remained at Bielefeld and worked on an Elan environment for the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. This required a run-time environment, which he called Eumel (“Extendable Multiuser Microprocessor ELAN-System”, but also a colloquial north-German term for a likeable fool). Eumel grew into a complete multi-tasking, multi-user operating system supporting orthogonal persistence, which started shipping in 1980 and was later ported to Zilog Z8000, Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 processors. As these processors lacked memory protection, Eumel implemented a virtual machine which added the features missing from the hardware. More than 2000 Eumel systems shipped, mostly to schools but also to legal practices as a text-processing platform.
In 1984, he joined the GMD (Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung, the German National Research Center for Computer Science, which is now a part of the Fraunhofer Society), where he continued his work on Eumel. In 1987, when microprocessors supporting virtual memory became widely available in the form of the Intel 80386, Liedtke started to design a new operating system to succeed Eumel, which he called L3 (“Liedtke's 3rd system”, after Eumel and the Algol 60 interpreter he had written in High School). L3 was designed to achieve better performance by using the latest hardware features, and was implemented from scratch. It was mostly backward-compatible with Eumel, thus benefiting from the existing Eumel ecosystem. L3 started to ship in 1989, with total deployment of at least 500.
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