John Hennessy

In 2000, Dr. John L. Hennessy was chosen to serve as the tenth President of Stanford University. A computer scientist and entrepreneur as well as educator, Hennessy is responsible for crucial innovations in computer programming that our present information age possible. John Hennesy's interest in computers began in adolescence. As a high school student on Long Island, he built home computers from mail-order kits. After earning a Ph.D. at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, he joined the faculty of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. In the 1960s and '70s, information technology was defined by mainframe computer systems, running instructions printed on punch cards or large spools of tape. Programming required lines and lines of code to accomplish simple tasks. In the 1980s, the old technology was giving way to the microprocessor, but the potential efficiencies of the new hardware could not be realized without a comparable transformation of the programming language. At Stanford, Hennessy led the development of a new model of computer architecture, the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC). Hennessy's work led to a new generation of computers with drastically increased efficiency. During his sabbatical year, 1984, Hennessy founded a new company, MIPS Technologies, to bring RISC technology to industry. In the following years, Hennessy continued to teach at Stanford, writing the standard texts read by computer science students throughout the world. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2001 Summit in San Antonio, Texas Hennessy recounts his role in the computer revolution and discusses the future of the digital age.