Peter Deutsch

(Note that "PeterDeutsch" usually means L. Peter Deutsch, but another famous PeterDeutsch is Canadian Peter J. Deutsch, creator of Archie; see below.)

L. Peter Deutsch (sometimes incorrectly referenced as "Peter L. Deutsch") wrote or rewrote many of the early virtual machines at Xerox (1971-1986). He also redesigned the bytecode instruction set, rewrote the compiler and reverse compiler, and was the creator of the ChangeList?. He was an early and strong proponent of moving the SmalltalkLanguage onto standard hardware and a standard character set.

While Peter didn't actually invent the trick of pre-compiling ByteCodes to native code, he was the principal designer and implementor of "PS" (PortableSmalltalk), the first modern on-the-fly-compiling virtual machine, and of the native-code compiler in "HPS" HighlyPortableSmalltalk), its retargetable successor.

Peter also wrote "GhostScript", the GNU PostScript implementation, first public release was v1.0 on 1988-08-11. Originally aladdin.com, handed over to http://www.artofcode.com in 2000.

Peter is a reliable source of top-flight information about anything Smalltalk or PostScript.

At age 12 was exposed to the legendary MIT Model Railroad club and thereby the TX-0 console.

While in high school, Peter wrote the first interactive Lisp interpreter, which ran on the PDP-1. It is available at http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html and runs on SIMH (http://simh.trailing-edge.com/).

With language creator CalvinMooers, implemented the landmark TracLanguage on a PDP-10 in 1964.

Spent several years at SunMicrosystems in the early 90s.

Some years ago was working on adapting Ghostscript into a DisplayPostscript for Stallman/FSF; I lost track of what happened to that effort.

Peter Deutsch is god (grinning). A truly legendary hacker.

Contributed by TomStambaugh, 30 October 95 Edited by L. Peter Deutsch, 7 November 1998 to fix factual errors.

May we presume he fixed them all? (grinning). Hi Peter, long time no see. --RonJeffries

There's an interview between L. Peter Deutsch and StigHackvan at http://www.devlinux.org/ghost/interview.html

TRAC: A Procedure- Describing Language for the Reactive Typewriter", Calvin N. Mooers, CACM 9(3):215-219 (Mar 1966). Rockford Research Inst, 1972].

Peter L. Deutsch and Allan Schiffman. "Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 System", 11th Annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Jan 1984, pp. 297-302

Peter J. Deutsch

Created Archie (named after "archiver", not comic strip), the first archiver of the Internet, in 1989, well before the WorldWideWeb, with two others (names?) while students at McGill? University in Montreal. Widely used and very popular in its time, Archie periodically polled all known ftp servers and indexed a list of their files.

Founded Bunyip Information Systems Inc. in 1992 to commercialize Archie.

IEEE Computer article by Peter J. Deutsch about Archie: http://www.computer.org/internet/v4n1/deutsch.htm

Audio interview http://town.hall.org/radio/Geek/062693_geek_ITR.html

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