He was the founder of artificial intelligence, which for him meant (among other things) a computer that could respond to you in real time, with humanlike common sense. He was likewise the creator of Lisp, an interactive symbol-processing programming language that not only had a compelling mathematical beauty but would let you grow your programs in a much more open-ended, organic manner than batch processing ever could. And he was the inventor of general-purpose computer "time-sharing," a technique that let individual users interact with batch-processing behemoths in a way that looked very much
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John McCarthy
