David Korn (computer scientist)

David Korn is an American UNIX programmer, who is probably best known for creating the Korn shell (ksh), a command line interface/programming language. The Korn shell is a de facto standard for UNIX-like systems and many other environments.

David Korn received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1969. After working on computer simulations of transsonic airfoils, he switched fields to computer science and became a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in 1976. He developed Korn shell in response to problems he and his colleagues had with the most commonly used shells at the time, Bourne shell and C shell. Korn shell is backward-compatible with Bourne shell, but takes a lot of ideas from C shell, such as history viewing and vi-like command line editing.

Korn shell and Microsoft

Microsoft once included a version of the Korn shell produced by Mortice Kern Systems (MKS) in a UNIX integration package for Windows NT. This version was not compatible with ksh88 (a Korn shell specification), and Korn mentioned this during a question and answer period of a Microsoft presentation during a USENIX NT conference in Seattle in 1997. Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager who was participating in the presentation, not knowing who the commenter was, insisted that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn shell. A polite debate ensued, with Sullivan continuing to insist that the man giving the criticisms was mistaken about the compatibility issues. Sullivan only backed down when an audience member stood up and mentioned that the man making the comments was none other than the eponymous David Korn.^[1]

Other software projects

Along with Korn shell, he is also known as the creator of UWIN, an X/Open library for Win32 systems, similar to Cygwin. Korn and Kiem-Phong Vo also co-developed sfio, a library for managing I/O streams.

Korn became a Bell Labs fellow in 1984. He currently lives in New York City and works for AT&T Research in Florham Park, New Jersey.

References

1. ^ " David Korn Tells All"

External links

• David Korn homepage on Kornshell.com
• Interview with David Korn on Slashdot, February 7, 2001
• A person's take on the David Korn encounter

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Name	Korn, David
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