Interviewed by David C. Brock on 2023-07-12 in Cambridge, MA
© Computer History Museum
This oral history interview with Barbara Liskov was conducted at MIT on July 12, 2023 in connection with her selection as a Computer History Museum Fellow. In the interview, Liskov describes her family background and youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. She reviews the development of her interest in mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and her subsequent move to the Boston area after graduation. There, in 1961, she took a job as a programmer at Mitre. After a year, Liskov took another programming job, working on Olivers Selfridge’s language translation effort at Harvard University.
From 1963 to 1968 she pursued, and earned, a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, with a thesis on chess endgame play with John McCarthy. Liskov describes her return to Mitre, and work on timesharing operating systems and software engineering. She details her move to the faculty of MIT in computer science, where early on she established her groundbreaking work on abstract data types. She recounts the development of her research at MIT over several decades, from abstract data types to distributed computing and from Viewstamped Replication to the Liskov Substitution Principle. She details her work in MIT administration on faculty equity and related issues, and her life after her retirement from MIT in 2014.
- Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information – http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792884
Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum’s Oral History Collection.
Collection number: 102792885
Acquisition number: 2023.0122
About The Author
