I know the name David Cheriton for his seminal work in distributed systems in the 1980s, including the V system he led the development of as a Stanford professor. (I've always been particularly fond of the "triangle RPCs" in VMTP, allowing the reply to an RPC to arrive from a node different from the one that the request was originally sent to. We gave serious consideration to using that model in the Netstation work in the mid-90s.) Others no doubt know his name as a venture capitalist; he made a gazillion (a google?) bucks backing a little startup named Google almost a decade ago.
Now his name will be known to many because of his gift of $25 million to the University of Waterloo, where the CS department now becomes the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.
Congratulations to UW, and thanks, David, for giving back! Without strong universities, we have no future.
No comments:
Post a Comment