Edward Fredkin

• 1. A Poor Boy With Fireworks

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  Edward Fredkin was born on the 2nd of October 1934 to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Los Angeles. His mother worked as a concert pianist but never performed professionally for money. She died from cancer when he was only eleven years old. His father lost everything during the stock market crash of 1929 and became poor again. The family struggled financially, sometimes living with other families or his older sister. Young Edward showed an entrepreneurial spirit early by handling a large newspaper delivery route. He bought chemistry supplies at age ten to make fireworks that were illegal in Los Angeles. School did not suit him because he refused to do homework assignments. He graduated from John Marshall High School one semester early to earn money for Caltech tuition. Caltech later admitted him despite having the worst high school grades they had ever seen. He quit Caltech partway through his sophomore year without finishing his degree.

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• 2. The Interrupt System That Changed Computing

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  Fredkin joined the United States Air Force in 1952 to become a fighter pilot before being drafted into the Korean War. His computer career began in 1956 when the Air Force assigned him to MIT Lincoln Laboratory. There he worked on the SAGE computer system. After completing his service in 1958, Fredkin was hired by J.C.R. Licklider to work at Bolt Beranek & Newman. He saw the PDP-1 computer prototype at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston in December 1959. Fredkin recommended that BBN purchase the very first PDP-1 unit. The new hardware arrived with no software whatsoever installed. He wrote a PDP-1 assembler language called FRAP which stood for Free of Rules Assembly Program. This became its first operating system. Working directly with Ben Gurley, the designer of the PDP-1, Fredkin designed significant modifications to support time-sharing via the BBN Time-Sharing System. He invented and designed the first modern interrupt system known as the Sequence Break. Digital Equipment Corporation later adopted this technology widely.

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• 3. Academic Paths Without A Degree

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  In 1968 Marvin Minsky recruited Fredkin to work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a full professor. This happened despite the fact that Fredkin had never graduated from college. From 1971 to 1974 Fredkin served as Director of Project MAC at MIT. Project MAC was renamed the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in 1976. He spent one year at Caltech as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar teaching Richard Feynman about computing. During that time he also learned quantum mechanics from Feynman himself. Then he became a professor of physics at Boston University for six years. Fredkin maintained formal and informal associations with Carnegie Mellon University over several decades. He held positions including Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at CMU. Later he became Distinguished Career Professor of Robotics at CMU. He also worked as a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory. His academic career spanned multiple institutions without ever holding a traditional bachelor degree.

• 4. Reality As Computation

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  Fredkin developed a theory called digital philosophy which claims all physical processes are forms of computation. Everything in physics must have a digital informational representation according to this framework. All changes in nature result from digital informational processes rather than continuous variables. Nature is finite and digital instead of infinite or analog. The SALT Cellular Automata family represented his attempt to model these ideas mathematically. Dan Miller designed and programmed the Busy Boxes implementation of Salt with assistance from Suresh Kumar Devanathan. These early models were two plus one dimensional quasi-physical reversible universal cellular automata. They followed rules modeling CPT reversibility in second order time. Fredkin believed biology reduces to chemistry which reduces to physics which reduces to information processing. This perspective motivated much of his later research into discrete models of fundamental processes.

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• 5. Millionaire By Age Thirty

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  In 1962 Fredkin founded Information International Inc., an early computer technology company. The firm developed high-precision film-to-digital scanners and other leading-edge hardware. The company became publicly traded and made Fredkin a millionaire by age thirty. He also founded Three Rivers Computer Corporation during his business career. New England Television Corporation owned Boston's CBS affiliate WNEV on channel seven under his leadership. The Reliable Water Company manufactured advanced sea water desalination plants for him. His diverse set of companies included ventures far beyond pure computing. He invented radio transponders for vehicle identification systems. The concept of computer navigation for automobiles originated from his work. Fredkin had been involved in computer vision and chess research as well. His entrepreneurial spirit drove him to create multiple successful enterprises simultaneously.

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• 6. Honors And Cultural Echoes

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  Fredkin died in Brookline Massachusetts on the 13th of June 2023 at the age of eighty-eight. In 1984 he received the Carnegie Mellon University Dickson Prize in Science. That award goes annually to someone judged to have made the most progress in science that year. CMU established the Fredkin professorship in 1999 to honor his contributions. A profile of Fredkin appeared in Robert Wright's book Three Scientists and Their Gods published in 1988. The section covering Fredkin was excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in April 1988. Biographer Robert Wright stated the character Stephen Falken in WarGames was modeled after Fredkin. Fredkin chaired the PDP-1 Restoration Project which restored a Computer History Museum machine after seven months. The project successfully reactivated the vintage computer system. His legacy includes both technical innovations and cultural references in media.

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