The computer security industry has lost one of its founders. Fernando “Corby” Corbato, who discovered computer passwords, has died at the age of 93. The MIT researcher invented the concept of password -protected user accounts . “It was just a matter of creating ‘compartmentalization’ and basic privacy ,” Corbato told the Wall Street Journal in a 2014 interview, a discovery that would help shape digital security today.
Corbato had other pioneering efforts. CTSS's concurrency model reduced the waiting time for computer responses from hours to seconds, making the technology more practical. The Multics time-sharing system, meanwhile, paved the way for future operating systems like Linux with finer privacy controls, a hierarchical file system, and other features that people take for granted today.
He is also behind “Corbato’s Law,” which claims that programmers will write the same amount of code regardless of the language they use. He opted for using higher-level languages to make the process less time-consuming.
Corbato, in his later years, knew that passwords had their problems—the Internet had made those connections “a nightmare,” he said. It’s no secret that the industry is moving away from passwords, both to deter account hijackers and to make life easier for users. Still, there’s no denying that Corbato’s work helped create the fundamentals of modern computing.
