The world of cybersecurity has lost one of its pioneers. The inventor of the compute password – Fernando Corbató – passed away on Friday in a Massachusetts nursing home at 93.
After completing a bachelor’s degree in physics at the California Institute of Technology, Corbató went on to get a PhD at the same university before being hired to study and teach at CIT full-time. He worked there until his retirement.
In addition to being the first person to put a password on a computer – designed to ensure files on one computer could not be accessed by another on a shared system – his work also inspired the development of time-sharing operating system (the technology that lets you have multiple applications open at the same time.
In the early 1990s, Corbató won the Turing Award for his “his pioneering work organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, CTSS and Multics.”
Though computer passwords are becoming a technology of the past – and systems now relying more on biometric security, such as face or fingerprint scanning – the invention was important in making computers and smartphones the devices they are today.
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