Tom Truscott

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Tom Truscott [1] Thomas Robert (Tom) Truscott (born 1953),

an American computer scientist, best known for creating the Usenet along with Jim Ellis [2] and Steven M. Bellovin [3]. As graduate student at the Duke University in the 70s, Truscott was early Checkers and chess programmer. The Duke program was a Checkers player written along with his fellow Eric Jensen and advisor Alan Biermann, which defeated Samuel’s program in a 2-game match [4] [5] [6]. Along with Eric Jensen and Bruce Wright, Tom Truscott wrote the chess program Duchess, which competed at ACM North American Computer Chess Championships from 1974 to 1979 and 1981, and the 2nd and 3rd World Computer Chess Championship in Toronto 1977 and Linz 1980 [7]. Tom Truscott now works for SAS [8], an analytics software company [9] .

Quotes

From Michael and Ronda Hauben’s netbook Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet [12]:

Truscott and [Wright](Bruce_Wright "Bruce Wright") continued to participate in the Chess Tournaments and in 1980 they competed in the 3rd world Computer Chess Championship held in Linz, Austria. [Thompson](Ken_Thompson "Ken Thompson") and [Joe Condon](Joe_Condon "Joe Condon"), who was a researcher at [Bell Labs](Bell_Laboratories "Bell Laboratories"), were also in the competition. Truscott notes that Thompson and Condon "had completed their hardware chess machine and snagged first place. [Duchess](Duchess "Duchess") came in third. And [Claude Shannon](Claude_Shannon "Claude Shannon") was in attendance, and even handed out the trophies at the awards ceremony. Afterwards we all went over to a TV studio to watch a West German TV special on computer chess and the championship. Claude Shannon and his wife were very engaging people. Someone took a photo of all of us, I have a copy buried somewhere".