Daniel Murphy (computer scientist)

Daniel Lee Murphy was an American computer scientist who helped build several foundations of interactive computing on the DEC PDP line. While at MIT in 1962 he created the text editor and language TECO, later implemented on most PDP computers, and he wrote a software demand paging system for the PDP-1. After joining Bolt, Beranek and Newman in 1965 he was one of the architects of the TENEX operating system, and with Ray Tomlinson he wrote the original email program during TENEX development. From 1972 he worked with Digital Equipment Corporation, and from January 1973 as an employee he headed the team that developed TOPS-20, an evolution of TENEX for newer PDP-10 models first marketed in 1976 on the DECSYSTEM-20. He died on 30 January 2026.