Tom Duff

Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff (b. December 8, 1952) is a computer programmer. — He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and grew up in Toronto and Leaside. In 1974 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a B.Math. and, two years later, got a M.Sc. from the University of Toronto.

He worked at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab and the Mark Williams Company in Chicago. Later he was with the Lucasfilm Computer Research and Development Division. While at Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center, he authored the well known "rc" shell for the (Unix-like) Plan 9 operating system. He moved to Pixar Animation Studios in 1996.

He (with others) in 1995 was awarded the "Academy Scientific and Engineering Award" for his work on "Digital Image Compositing". With Bill Reeves he designed the first version of Pixar's "Marionette" 3-D animation system, which in 1997 won the same award.

While working in Lucasfilm, he created Duff's device – a loop-unrolling mechanism in C.

External links

• Tom Duff (short cv on family web site)
• rc – The Plan 9 Shell
• Tim J. Goodwin (free re-implementation of "rc")
• Pixar Animation Studios (awards)