Stephen C. Johnson

For the 19th-century New York politician see Stephen C. Johnson (state senator).

Stephen Curtis Johnson is a computer scientist. He spent nearly 20 years at Bell Labs and AT&T where he wrote yacc, lint, spell and the Portable C Compiler.

Johnson earned his PhD in mathematics but has spent his entire career in computer science. He has worked on topics as diverse as computer music, psychometrics, and VLSI design but he is best known for his work on Unix tools and the first AT&T UNIX port. He also ran the UNIX System V language development department for several years in the mid-1980s. In 1986 he went to Silicon Valley where he was part of a half dozen or so startup companies including Transmeta. In 2002 he joined MathWorks to contribute to the MATLAB programming language.

Johnson served on the USENIX board for ten years, four of those as president, and is now the USENIX representative to the Computing Research Association.

External links

• Johnson's personal web site
• Computerworld Interview with Steve Johnson