(p. B9) Dr. Wulf made a career in computer science when the field barely existed. As the importance of computers grew, his career became a road map of the developing field: first in academic research, next as an entrepreneur and then as a policymaker.
. . .
He and his wife, Anita K. Jones, also a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, left the university in 1981 to found Tartan Laboratories, which specialized in compilers. (It was named for the university’s athletic teams.)
. . .
Dr. Wulf and Dr. Jones moved to faculty positions at the University of Virginia, but Dr. Wulf took a leave of absence to join the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. There, he worked with Al Gore, then a senator, to craft legislation to make the military’s computer network, Arpanet, available to civilian researchers through the foundation’s NSFnet. That model gave way eventually to widely accessible, commercially operated networks.
. . .
Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, said of Dr. Wulf in an interview, “I don’t mean to diminish his technical contributions” — both he and Dr. Jones “are giants in the field,” he said — but Dr. Wulf, he believes, will be most remembered for his inspiring leadership in engineering.
In particular, he said, Dr. Wulf was “a huge champion of broadening participation in the field” by not only women and members of other underrepresented groups, but also by people who did not necessarily come from “big research universities, mostly on the coasts.”
Dr. Wulf called engineering “problem-solving under constraints” — time, money or other practical issues. Bringing diverse experiences and points of view to problems, he said, raises the odds of success. Without diverse views, he told an academy meeting in 1998, “we pay an opportunity cost — a cost in products not built, in designs not considered, in constraints not understood, in processes not invented.”
Or, as Dr. Lazowska put it: “You don’t have to have a social conscience. All you have to be is a capitalist who wants to make better things and sell more of them.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated March 23, 2023, and has the title “William A. Wulf, Pioneering Computer Scientist, Dies at 83.” Where there is a difference in wording in versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)