Business and technologyדני כהן

Danny Cohen

Danny Cohen was an Israeli-American computer scientist who worked on computer networking, the ARPANet and early Internet protocols.

1937 to 2019Coining big-endian and little-endianSeparating TCP and IPCohen-Sutherland line clipping algorithmEarly voice over networks

Born: 9 December 1937, Haifa
Died: 12 August 2019, Palo Alto
Occupation: computer scientist, university teacher
Education: California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Danny Cohen was born in 1937 in Haifa

Cohen was born in Haifa in 1937. His mother, Dorit Osterreicher, came from Hungary, and his father, David, came from the United States.

He served in the paratrooper Nahal and fought in the 1956 Sinai Campaign. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the Technion in 1963 and studied at MIT from 1965. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969 under Ivan Sutherland.

In 1967 he built a real-time flight simulator and radar simulator on a general purpose computer. With Sutherland he created the Cohen-Sutherland line clipping algorithm. He taught at Harvard and Caltech, then joined the Information Sciences Institute at USC to work on sending voice over the ARPANet, a forerunner of VoIP.

He helped separate TCP and IP, and his 1980 paper brought the terms big-endian and little-endian into computing. He started the MOSIS project in 1980, co-founded Myricom in 1994 and joined Sun Microsystems in 2001.

He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. In his last years he had Parkinson's disease, and he died in Palo Alto in 2019.