UBIQUITY: Congratulations on "What the Dormouse Said" it's a fascinating book. MARKOFF: Well, I guess I'd call it a revisionist history. It about things that happened around Stanford University between roughly 1960 and 1975, and is a kind of pre-history of personal computing and the personal computer industry. What I was trying to do was to get at some of the culture through which the technology was developed. MARKOFF: Because technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960's: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 11 2007 In the article below, the "whirring tapes" of IBM's latest computer in 1949 were an anachronism. Magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951. In the mid-1950s, John Backus, who has died aged 82, led a team at IBM that created a revolutionary new way to communicate with early electronic computers. They invented Fortran, the first true programming language, and in doing so laid the foundations of today's multi-billion dollar software industry. During a long career at IBM, Backus continued to seek better methods of computer programming, but his enduring legacy is Fortran, the language that is still used today to solve complex scientific problems such as weather forecasting and aircraft design.

Backus was born in Philadelphia and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Del., where he was apparently an indifferent student, according to his biographical entry in the Wikipedia. After a stint in the U.S. Army (during which he was treated for a brain tumor), Backus ended up in New York City, where he gravitated toward mathematics. Earning a master's degree in the discipline in 1949, he joined International Business Machines the following year to work on the firm's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator. The SSEC was one of the last of the large electromechanical computers ever built. It also was one of the first to run a stored program.

This past October saw the death of John McCarthy, one of the pioneers of computer science and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a phrase he is credited with inventing. It capped a sad month that also saw the passing of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and of Dennis Ritchie, the coinventor of Unix and the C programming language. John McCarthy was born in Boston in 1927, but he grew up near Caltech, where he got his B.S. in mathematics. He detoured to Princeton for his Ph.D. but ended up at MIT, where he cofounded its artificial-intelligence lab, the world's first, before going on to Stanford in 1962 to found its artificial-intelligence lab. In between, he found time to invent Lisp, one of the most influential programming languages ever created.

Ray Solomonoff, a physicist who was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, died on Dec. 7 in Boston. He was 83 and had homes in New Ipswich, N.H., and Cambridge, Mass. The cause was a ruptured brain aneurysm, said his wife, Grace. As a child Mr. Solomonoff developed what would become a lifelong passion for mathematical theorems, and as a teenager he became captivated with idea of creating machines that could learn and ultimately think. In 1952 he met Marvin Minsky, a cognitive scientist who was also exploring the idea of machine learning, and John McCarthy, a young mathematician.

It is important to divide the overall understanding process into manageable pieces.

Today the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) announced its 2014 fellows, and among the awardees were five researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) -- more than any other academic institution in the world. Srini Devadas, Eric Grimson, Robert Morris, Ronitt Rubinfeld, and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus were among the 1 percent of ACM members to receive the distinction, according to the association's press release. The ACM fellows, chosen from universities, corporations, and research labs, were selected for contributions that have provided key knowledge to the computing field and generated multiple technology advances in industry, commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and education. "While it certainly isn't unprecedented for CSAIL researchers to receive this honor, it is quite remarkable that this year ACM has chosen to recognize five members of our community," said Daniel Jackson, associate director of CSAIL. "We are extremely proud of our PIs who have been selected to be part of such esteemed company."

Seth Teller, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT who was well known for his efforts to advance human-robot interactions, died yesterday. He was 50, and he had been a member of the MIT faculty since 1994. President L. Rafael Reif announced the news in an email to the MIT community. "I knew Seth as a person of great human warmth and intellectual intensity," Reif wrote in his letter. "He was a brilliant engineer and a gifted advisor with a passion for new challenges. His loss is difficult to grasp."

Michael Sipser, the Barton L. Weller Professor of Mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics since 2004, has been named dean of the School of Science. Sipser has served as the school's interim dean since December, when he was chosen to replace Marc Kastner, the Donner Professor of Physics; in November, President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate Kastner to head the Department of Energy's Office of Science. "In 10 years as head of MIT's Department of Mathematics, Mike Sipser sustained its extraordinary stature while building a warm sense of community," MIT President L. Rafael Reif says. "His integrity, fairness, and patience will serve him very well in the role of dean. And as the School of Science faces difficult trends in federal funding, I believe Mike's gift for explaining complex scientific concepts will be a tremendous asset in Washington."

The annual MIT IDEAS Global Challenge awards ceremony awarded $79,500 on Monday night to 13 student-led teams to further develop inventions and ideas intended to solve pressing environmental and health challenges in developing countries. "Today marks an important opportunity for emerging entrepreneurs to take a big leap forward in their journey to improve the quality of life in communities around the world," Keely Swan, the Public Service Center's IDEAS Global Challenge program administrator, said in her welcoming remarks. Launched and run by MIT students, the winning ventures took home prizes of $10,000, $7,500, $5,000, and $1,500, to further support prototyping and field-testing, among other things. CleanData-CleanWater, a $10,000 winner last night, plans to use its earnings to manufacture 1,000 of its sensors, which gather previously unavailable data on water filter usage in developing countries. The sensors fit on a filter's tap and track how long the tap stays up or down, measuring the frequency and duration of use. The company plans to integrate the sensors into a new line of ceramic pot water filters being installed across Ghana by the company Pure Home Water, a previous IDEAS winner.