Computer scientist helped set internet’s foundation
Cornelia Dean
William A. Wulf, a pioneering researcher, entrepreneur and policymaker in computer science, who helped adapt an early Pentagon communications web into the network that eventually grew into the internet, died March 10 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was 83.
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 later led efforts to reshape and inspire thinking about the conduct, progress and ethics of engineering.
William Allan Wulf was born in Chicago on Dec. 8, 1939, the only son of Otto Wulf, an engineer who immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and Helen (Westemeier) Wulf. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-champaign.
As a graduate student at the University of Virginia in 1968, Dr. Wulf was one of the first people to receive a PH.D. in computer science, a new academic offspring of applied mathematics, electrical engineering and related disciplines.
After completing his doctorate, he joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a center of computer science research. There, he worked on computer architecture and programming languages, particularly compilers, which translate programs written in so-called “high level” languages, like today’s Java or C++, into steps a computer can execute.
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 (and was named for the university’s athletic teams).
By the time Wulf and Jones left the company, in 1988, it was being cited as one of the high-tech companies transforming Pittsburgh from a rusting steel town into a hightech powerhouse. It was later sold to Texas Instruments.
Wulf and Jones moved to faculty positions at the University of Virginia, but 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.
According to the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional group, Wulf was “among a very small, distinguished group of people that made significant, core contributions to the creation of the modern internet.”
In 1990, he returned to the University of Virginia, whose computer science program had become a separate department in 1984 and was chaired by Jones. She survives him, along with their two daughters, Ellen Wulf Epstein and Karin Wulf, and four grandsons.
Over the years, he was honored by every major professional society in computer science, as well as the American Philosophical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other groups.
In 1993, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1996 he was appointed its interim president.