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Home/Magazine Archive/June 2023 (Vol. 66, No. 6)/In Memoriam: William A. Wulf/Abstract

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In Memoriam: William A. Wulf

By Simson L. Garfinkel, Eugene H. Spafford
Communications of the ACM, June 2023, Vol. 66 No. 6, Pages 20-23
10.1145/3594711
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William A. Wulf was among the first computer science Ph.D.'s. He was an accomplished academic who worked at the intersection of operating systems, computer architecture, and computer languages. He was an entrepreneur who co-founded a company to commercialize his research. And he was hugely influential in computing policy, making major contributions at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Wulf grew up in Chicago, under severe economic hardship after his father developed Parkinson's disease when Wulf was a small child. He enrolled at the University of Illinois' temporary branch campus on Chicago's Navy Pier—the only school he could afford—where he studied engineering physics.

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