Warren Teitelman
| Warren Teitelman | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1941 |
| Died | August 12, 2013 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | PhD |
| Alma mater | MIT |
| Occupation | Computer scientist |
| Known for | Inventing Interlisp and computer concepts such as UNDO or spellcheck |
Warren Teitelman (1941 – August 12, 2013) was an American computer scientist known for his work on programming environments and the invention and first implementation of concepts including UNDO, REDO, spelling correction, advising, online help, and DWIM (Do What I Mean).
Warren Teitelman presented a novel scheme for real time character recognition in his master's thesis submitted in 1963 at MIT. A rectangle, in which a character is to be drawn, is divided into two parts, one shaded and the other unshaded. Using this division a computer converts characters into ternary vectors (a list composed of 3 values, 0, 1, or -) in the following way. If a pen enters the shaded region, a 1 is added to the vector. When the unshaded region is entered, a 0 is appended. The thesis continued to be cited for several decades after its submission.
He started as ARPA Principal Investigator from 1968 to 1978, and was responsible for the design and development of BBN LISP at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, developing the idea of a programming system for a personal computer. He used the ARPANET to support users of BBN Lisp at Stanford, SRI, USC, and CMU in 1970, and has been named an official ARPANET Pioneer, for his contributions to its development and growth. He developed a Programmer's Assistant" as part of BBN-LISP, which was one of the first with an Undo function, by 1971. He developed a program on the SDS 940 for Bob Kahn that allowed experimentation with various routing policies in order to see the effect on network traffic and real time monitoring of the packets.
He worked as Senior Scientist at Xerox PARC from 1972 until 1984; during this time he designed Interlisp.Bill Joy has acknowledged that many of the ideas in the C shell were inspired by and copied from Interlisp. In Interlisp, Teitelman invented DWIM ("Do What I Mean"), a function that attempted to correct many common typing errors. It was a package of Lisp routines which would "correct errors automatically or with minor user intervention"—thus making the code do what the user meant, not what they wrote. The program was developed based upon Teitelman's own writing style and idiosyncrasies in 1972, and then used by other individuals in his office, followed by users across the industry. In 1977, he and Bob Sproull implemented the first client–server window system, D-Lisp. D-Lisp used the Alto as a display device on which ran the window manager and event handler, communicating with Interlisp running on a MAXC (a PDP-10 clone). This system pioneered such concepts as overlapping windows where the window containing the focus did not have to be on top to receive events, on-line contextual help, and the ability to cut, copy, and paste from previous commands given to the shell.
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