Contribution

Joined Bell Labs in 1967, Aho co-authored a number of research papers, first with Jeff Ullman, and then with several other co-workers. He soon stumbled upon what would become the UNIX project, and found that using the early system "was a much nicer way to write papers than the old traditional way". Through UNIX, Aho helped develop automata theory and its applications to programming language parsing and compilation.

Fun Facts:

Aho is the "A" in the command AWK. This language was named by its authors, Al Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan.

Related Links

A Summary of the Al Aho Interview

Professor M. S. Mahoney's interview with Al Aho

Why is the picture on a Playing Card