Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth received the degree of Electronics Engineer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1959. Thereafter he studied at Laval University in Quebec, Canada, and at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received the PH.D. degree in 1963. Until 1967 he was Assistant Professor at the newly created Computer Science Department at Stanford University. From 1968 until his retirement in 1999 he was professor at ETH in Zurich. There he developed the programming languages Pascal (1970), Modula-2 (1979) and Oberon (1988). He spent two sabbatical years at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, where he became an enthusiastic user of the workstation Alto, which heralded a new era of computing with its high-resolution display and the mouse. Back in Switzerland, he designed and built, together with R. Ohran, the workstation Lilith in conjunction with the programming language Modula-2. A pilot series was available in 1980 and allowed for a modern way to teach software engineering. There followed the workstations Ceres which served as the original platform for the operating system and language Oberon. From 1992 - 99 Wirth's research concentrated on digital design tools, including the language Lola, and on the use of programmable devices. Wirth was Chairman of the Division of Computer Science at ETH from 1982 until 1984, and from 1988 until 1990. From 1990 - 1994 he served as head of the Institute of Computer Systems of ETH. Born on 15 February 1934 in Switzerland, Wirth was a luminary in the field and celebrated for his development of several groundbreaking programming languages including ALGOL W, Pascal, and Modula-2. Wirth died aged 89 on 1 January 2024.