Technology pioneer Robert Fano’s contributions to computer science are many—so many, indeed, that it would be best to frame them as his Massachusetts Institute of Technology colleague (and fellow innovator) Fernando Carbato did. Fano, he said, had “at least four careers depending on how you count.” We’re traveling back to the 1940s in this week’s ‘Pioneers in Tech.’
From GM to MIT
The first of these careers was as a student engineer at General Motors in World War II. The Fano family has immigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape the Mussolini regime in Italy. After finishing his undergrad degree at MIT in 1941, he took the job at GM and briefly supervised the welding machine team. That career lasted only a few months.
Fano found his way back to MIT, where he started working on his doctorate. He worked in the radiation laboratory and helped developed microwave radar. When he earned his doctorate in 1947, he joined the MIT faculty.
Educational impact and legacy
Along the way he was involved in multiple ground-breaking projects. With Corbato, he developed the first time-sharing computer operating system to run on an IBM computer, removing the need to wait two days before receiving a printout of a computer program. He once recalled: “If you misplaced a comma in any program, well, those two days were gone!” In addition, Fano and Claude Shannon developed the Shannon-Fano method of data compression.
But alongside these computer science achievements is a remarkable gift to the field itself: his career as an educator. When MIT had the making of a computer science department but not the leadership, Fano stepped in and provided it, which ultimately resulted in an academic major and an entire department.
Born Nov. 11, 1917, in Turin, Italy, Fano passed away July 13, 2016, in Naples, Florida, at age 98.
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