Daniel Murphy (computer scientist)

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Daniel L. Murphy is an American computer scientist known for helping create the TECO text editor, the TENEX operating system, TOPS-20, and early email. He studied at MIT, graduating in 1965. In 1962 he built TECO, which later ran on most PDP computers. He also worked on a simple software paging system for the PDP-1 at MIT. Murphy joined Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in 1965, where he used an SDS 940 with hardware paging from the Berkeley Timesharing System. When the PDP-10 arrived, he helped design TENEX for the machine’s paging hardware. While developing TENEX, he and Ray Tomlinson wrote the original email program. In October 1972 he joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as a contractor to port TENEX to the KI10 PDP-10. On January 2, 1973 he became a full DEC employee and led the team that built TOPS-20, the TENEX-based operating system for newer PDP-10 models. TOPS-20 was first sold in 1976 on the DECSYSTEM-20.