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Palo Alto Spinal Cord Injury Service - VA Palo Alto Health Care System. Frank R. Wilson. Eric E. Sabelman. Computing Pioneer Dies  John McCarthy, creator of the Lisp programming language and pioneer in utility computing—the forerunner of today’s cloud computing—died Sunday in Stanford, California. He was 84. McCarthy was an important figure in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and the design of computer languages. McCarthy was born September 4, 1927, in Boston. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Caltech in 1948, and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951.

Four years later, he was the principal author of a 1955 proposal that is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence.” “The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it,” the proposal began. The resulting study took place at Dartmouth College in 1956. McCarthy was a professor at MIT from 1958 until 1962. Steve Jobs’s Real Genius. Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto.

Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man.

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it.