Noted MIT computer professor Michael L. Dertouzos dies at 64
By Associated Press, 08/29/01
CAMBRIDGE -- Michael L. Dertouzos, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who taught nontechnical audiences how to access complicated technology, died Monday at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 64.
Dertouzos joined the MIT faculty in 1964 and became director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in 1974. The lab is now the North American home of the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations that helps promote the Web's evolution.
He spent much of the past quarter century studying and forecasting future technological shifts. In 1976, he predicted the emergence of a computer in three out of every four U.S. homes by the mid-1990s.
During the Carter Administration, Dertouzos was chairman of a White House advisory group that redesigned the White House information systems.
Dertouzos wrote eight books. His latest, "The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us," was published this year.
"Few individuals have so personally and profoundly shaped their institutions and professional fields," MIT President Charles M. Vest said.
Dertouzos was born and raised in Athens, Greece. He won a Fullbright scholarship to the University of Arkansas, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1964.
Dertouzos, a Weston resident at the time of his death, held patents on a graphical display system, an incremental photoelectric encoder, a graphic tablet, and on a parallel thermal printer.
Dertouzos married Hadwig Gofferje in 1961. They divorced in 1993. In 1998 he married Catherine Liddell, who survives him along with his two children, Alexandra Dertouzos Rowe and Leonidas M. Dertouzos, and a granddaughter.
A funeral service will be held in Athens on Sept. 4, followed by a memorial service at MIT.
