Mike Lesk

Michael E. Lesk is a computer programmer. In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a PhD in Chemical Physics. In the 1970s, he worked at Bell Labs, in the group that built Unix. Lesk wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl, refer, and the standard ms macro package, all for troff), for compiling (Lex), and for networking (uucp). He also wrote the Portable I/O Library (the predecessor to stdio.h in C) and contributed significantly to the development of the C language preprocessor. In the 1980s, Lesk worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography (a system for driving...