Per Brinch Hansen
computer scientist (1938-2007)
Per Brinch Hansen (13 November 1938 – 31 July 2007) was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing.
Biography
Early life and education
Per Brinch Hansen was born in Frederiksberg, an enclave surrounded by Copenhagen, Denmark. His father, Jørgen Brinch Hansen, worked as a civil engineer, becoming a leading expert in soil mechanics, and later accepting a professorship at Technical University of Denmark. His mother, Elsebeth Brinch Hansen (née Ring), was the daughter of Danish composer Oluf Ring and worked as a hairdresser before marrying.
Brinch Hansen attended Skt. Jørgens Gymnasium and then studied electrical engineering at Technical University of Denmark where he sought an area to pursue that "was still in its pioneering phase" on the belief that "If a subject was being taught, it was probably already too late to make fundamental contributions." After a seven-week student internship at IBM's Hursley Laboratory in England, he decided to dedicate his career to computers. Initially focused on computer construction, reading a book on the IBM 7030 Stretch project that described computer organization from a programmer's point of view refocused his interest toward becoming a computer architect.
Regnecentralen
After completing a Master of Science degree in electronic engineering in 1963, Brinch Hansen landed a job at Regnecentralen, then a research institution under The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences (Akademiet for de Tekniske Videnskaber), working in the compiler group, led by Peter Naur and Jørn Jensen. There, his first significant project was writing a parser for a COBOL compiler for the Siemens 3003 computer.
Subsequently, he wrote a file system to be used during execution of the compiled COBOL programs, later observing:
I now understand that it was really a small operating system, I had programmed.
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This entry incorporates text from “Per Brinch Hansen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.