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Per Brinch Hansen is one of a handful of computer pioneers who was responsible for advancing both operating systems development and concurrent programming from ad hoc techniques to systematic engineering disciplines. His work illustrates a relentless search for simplicity exemplified by the RC 4000 multiprogramming system, the monitor concept, and the programming language Concurrent Pascal. His work has influenced most operating systems and concurrent programming languages developed over the last twenty-five years.
Brinch Hansen received the master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark in 1962. Until 1970 he worked at Regnecentralen, Copenhagen, where he was responsible for the architecture and software of the RC 4000 minicomputer. The RC 4000 multiprogramming system introduced the now-standard concept of an operating system kernel and the separation of policy and mechanism in operating system design. The microkernels and remote procedure calls used in modern operating systems can trace their roots back to the RC 4000 system. From 1970 to 1972 he was a research associate at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he wrote the first comprehensive textbook on Operating System Principles (1973), published in six languages. Since then his main contribution has been the development of secure programming language concepts for parallel computing. His most influential early idea was the monitor concept, which combines process synchronization with object-oriented programming. By 1975 he had developed Concurrent Pascal, the first parallel programming language based on monitors. The Solo operating system, written in Concurrent Pascal, demonstrated that it is possible to write simple operating systems in a secure programming language without machine-dependent features. He wrote the first book on parallel programming, The Architecture of Concurrent Programs (1977), which includes the complete program text of the Solo operating system. Since 1972 Brinch Hansen has held professorial appointments in computer science at California Institute of Technology, University of Southern California, and University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Per Brinch Hansen is a distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Syracuse University, a position he has held since 1987. Honors and Awards: Doctor Technices, Technical University of Denmark, 1978; First Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California, 1982; Chancellor’s Medal, Syracuse University, 1989; Computer Pioneer Award, IEEE Computer Society, 2002. |
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Books P. Brinch Hansen, Operating System Principles. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973. Translated into German, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Japanese.
P. Brinch Hansen, The Architecture of Concurrent Programs. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1977. Translated into German and Japanese.
P. Brinch Hansen, Programming a Personal Computer. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983. Translated into Japanese. P. Brinch Hansen, Brinch Hansen on Pascal Compilers. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1985.
P. Brinch Hansen, Studies in Computational Science: Parallel Programming Paradigms. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995.
P. Brinch Hansen, The Search for Simplicity: Essays in Parallel Programming. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1996.
P. Brinch Hansen, Programming for Everyone in Java. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1999.
P. Brinch Hansen (editor), Classic Operating Systems: From Batch Processing to Distributed Systems. Springer-Verlag,
New York, 2001.
P. Brinch Hansen (editor), The Origin of Concurrent Programming: From Semaphores to Remote Procedures Calls. Springer-Verlag, New York, 2002. Selected Papers
P. Brinch Hansen, RC 4000 Software: Multiprogramming System. Regnecentralen, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1969.
P. Brinch Hansen, The nucleus of a multiprogramming system. Comm. ACM 13, 4 (1970), 238-42.
P. Brinch Hansen, Structured multiprogramming. Comm. ACM 15, 7 (1972), 574-78.
P. Brinch Hansen, The programming language Concurrent Pascal. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 1, 2 (1975), 199-207.
P. Brinch Hansen, The Solo operating system. Software - Practice and Experience, 6, 2 (1976), 141-205.
P. Brinch Hansen, Distributed processes: a concurrent programming concept. Comm. ACM 21, 11 (1978), 934-41.
P. Brinch Hansen, The design of Edison. Software - Practice and Experience 11, 4 (1981), 363-96.
P. Brinch Hansen, Joyce - a programming language for distributed systems. Software - Practice and Experience 17, 1 (1987), 29-50.
P. Brinch Hansen, SuperPascal - a publication language for parallel scientific computing. Concurrency - Practice and Experience 6, 5 (1994), 461-83. P. Brinch Hansen, Monitors and Concurrent Pascal: A personal history. In T. J. Bergin, Jr., and R. G. Gibsons (editors), History of Programming Languages II, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996.
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