Dertouzos, Michael L.

Dertouzos, Michael L.

(1936–2001) Greek-American

Computer Scientist, Futurist

Born in Athens, Greece, on November 5, 1936, Michael Dertouzos spent adventurous boyhood years accompany-ing his father (an admiral) in the Greek navy’s destroyers and submarines. He became interested in Morse Code, shipboard machinery, and mathematics. At the age of 16 he read an article about Claude Shannon’s work in infor-mation theory and a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that sought to build a mechanical robot “mouse.” He quickly decided that he wanted to come to America to study at MIT.

After the hardships of the World War II years inter-vened, Dertouzos received a Fulbright scholarship that placed him in the University of Arkansas, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees while working on acous-tic-mechanical devices for the Baldwin Piano Company. He was then able to fulfill his boyhood dream by receiving his Ph.D. from MIT, then promptly joined the faculty. He was director of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) starting in 1974. The lab has been a hotbed of new ideas in computing, including computer time-sharing, Ethernet networking, and public-key cryptography. Dertouzos also embraced the growing Internet and serves as coordinator of the World Wide Web consortium, a group that seeks to cre-ate standards and plans for the growth of the network.

Combining theoretical interest with an entrepreneur’s eye on market trends, Dertouzos started a small company called Computek in 1968. It made some of the first “smart terminals” that included their own processors.

In the 1980s, Dertouzos began to explore the rela-tionship between developments and infrastructure in information processing and the emerging “information marketplace.” However, the spectacular growth of the information industry has taken place against a backdrop of the decline of American manufacturing. Dertouzos’s 1989 book, Made In America, suggested ways to revitalize Amer-ican industry.

During the 1990s, Dertouzos brought MIT into closer relationship with the visionary designers who were creating and expanding the World Wide Web. When Tim Berners-Lee and other Web pioneers were struggling to create the World Wide Web consortium to guide the future of the new technology, Dertouzos provided extensive guidance to help them set their agenda and structure. (See World Wide

Web and Berners-Lee, Tim.)

Dertouzos was dissatisfied with operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and with popular applications pro-grams. He believed that their designers made it unneces-sarily difficult for users to perform tasks, and spent more time on adding fancy features than on improving the basic usability of their products. In 1999, Dertouzos and the MIT LCS announced a new project called Oxygen. Working in collaboration with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Labora-tory, Oxygen was intended to make computers “as natural a part of our environment as the air we breathe.”

As a futurist, Dertouzos tried to paint vivid pictures of possible future uses of computers in order to engage the general public in thinking about the potential of emerging technologies. His 1995 book, What Will Be, paints a vivid portrait of a near-future pervasively digital environment. His imaginative future is based on actual MIT research, such as the design of a “body net,” a kind of wearable computer and sensor system that would allow people to not only keep in touch with information but also to com-municate detailed information with other people simi-larly equipped. This digital world will also include “smart rooms” and a variety of robot assistants, particularly in the area of health care. However, this and his 2001 publica-tion, The Unfinished Revolution, are not unalloyed celebra-tions of technological wizardry. Dertouzos has pointed out that there is a disconnect between technological visionar-ies who lack understanding of the daily realities of most peoples’ lives, and humanists who do not understand the intricate interconnectedness (and thus social impact) of new technologies.

Dertouzos was given an IEEE Fellowship and awarded membership in the National Academy of Engineering, He died on August 27, 2001, after a long bout with heart dis-ease. He was buried in Athens near the finish line for the Olympic marathon.