Stephen C. Johnson
Stephen Curtis Johnson (b. 1944; known as Steve Johnson) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and AT&T for nearly 20 years. He is best known for Yacc, Lint, spell, and the Portable C Compiler, which contributed to the spread of Unix and C. He has also contributed to fields as diverse as computer music, psychometrics and VLSI design. Life and education Johnson's passion for computing started at age five, when his grandfather took him along to his work at the Bureau of Standards. The computer he saw ("the size of a small house") made a strong impression on him, and he decided he "wanted to work with computers, and never looked back after". There were no computer science classes in college, so he studied mathematics, in which he eventually earned a PhD. Career Bell Labs and AT&T Johnson joined Bell Labs and AT&T in the 1960s and worked on Unix tools for nearly 20 years, alongside computer scientists like Jeffrey Ullman, Dennis Ritchie and Alfred Aho. He was best known for writing Yacc, Lint, and the Portable C Compiler. In the mid-1970s, Johnson and Bell colleague Dennis Ritchie co-authored the first AT&T Unix port. They also "demonstrated