Daniel Weinreb facts for kids

Daniel L. Weinreb (born January 6, 1959 – died September 7, 2012) was a talented American computer scientist and programmer. He did very important work with a computer language called Lisp.

Early Life

Daniel Weinreb was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 6, 1959. His parents, Herbert and Phyllis Weinreb, raised him there. He had two brothers, Bill and David. Daniel went to Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn.

Education

Daniel finished St. Ann's School in 1975. He was only 16 years old when he started attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He studied there from 1975 to 1979.

He earned a B.S. degree in computer science and electrical engineering. While at MIT, he and Mike McMahon created two text editors. These were computer programs used for writing and editing text. They were called EINE and ZWEI.

These editors were made for MIT's Lisp machine, a special type of computer. EINE was the first version of a popular editor called Emacs that worked with a graphical user interface (GUI). A GUI lets you use a computer with pictures and icons, not just text commands. EINE was also the first Emacs program written using the Lisp language. Many other famous Emacs programs, like Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs, later used Lisp too.

Professional Life

From 1979 to 1980, Daniel Weinreb worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He helped create parts of an operating system called Amber for a very powerful computer, a supercomputer, known as the S-1. He focused on how the computer stored files and managed different tasks.

In 1980, Daniel helped start a company called Symbolics. There, he developed software for their Lisp machines. He also played a big part in designing a computer language called Common Lisp (CL). He was one of five people who wrote the first official rules for this language. He also worked on Statice, a special kind of database for objects, which Symbolics released in 1988.

In 1988, he co-founded Object Design, Incorporated (ODI). At ODI, he helped design and build ObjectStore. This was a very important commercial object database. An object database stores information in a way that's like how computer programs see things. Today, ObjectStore is still used and supported by another company, Progress Software.

In 2002, Daniel joined BEA Systems. He worked as an architect for WebLogic, helping to design how its operations and management systems worked.

In 2006, he moved to ITA Software. Here, he worked on a system for booking airline flights, called an airline reservations system (ARS). In 2009, Daniel gave a talk about how ITA Software used Common Lisp for this system.

In 2009, he was the leader for the International Lisp Conference. This big meeting for Lisp experts took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Personal Life

Daniel Weinreb married Cheryl Moreau in 1986. They had a son named Adam in 1991.

Daniel Weinreb passed away on September 7, 2012. He had been battling cancer for about a year.