Contributor to the End-to-end principle in systems design — one of the important underlying principles governing the operation of the Internet — Saltzer is a computer scientist who made many notable contributions. Born in Nampa, Idaho, he was known to all—colleagues, students, friends, and family—as "Jerry". In 1961 he married Marlys Anne Hughes. They have two children and two grandchildren. He earned his Sc.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1966.
Starting in 1966, Saltzer joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. One of his earliest involvements with computers was with MIT's CTSS time-sharing operating system in the early 1960s. In the later 1960s and early 1970s, he served as one of the team leaders of the Multics operating system project. Multics, though not particularly commercially successful in itself, had a major impact on all subsequent operating systems; in particular, it was an inspiration for Ken Thompson to develop Unix. His contributions to Multics included the now-standard kernel stack switching method of process switching, as well as often-cited work on the security architecture for shared information systems.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the research group Saltzer led—the Computer Systems Research group of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science—was one of the key players in the development of the Internet and ring network technology for local area networks. One of his notable accomplishments was a key patent used by the Proteon ProNet ring network. Perhaps his most notable contribution in that area was his contribution to the End-to-end principle in systems design, which is one of the important underlying principles that govern the operation of the Internet.
From 1984 through 1988 he served as Technical Director of MIT Project Athena. Saltzer@mit.edu is one of the few Athena usernames with a capital letter, and legend has it that several special case hacks were required to support this functionality. In September 1995 he retired from his full-time faculty position, but continued writing and teaching part-time at MIT.
Saltzer has had significant impact on the development of computer systems through the influence of a legion of students—both graduate students and undergraduates who took his famous MIT course in information systems, 6.033. He has been a designer or the inspiration for a number of important pieces of systems software, which are either still in use or have descendants still being used today. Among these are RUNOFF, a very early text-formatting program that was the basis for roff and nroff; PC/IP, the first TCP/IP stack for the IBM PC, which became the basis for a company called FTP Software; and Kerberos, an authentication protocol and part of Project Athena, still used today. Additionally, while serving as Technical Director of Project Athena, he was supportive of the development of the X Window System, an open windowing system still used and developed to this day on Linux and UNIX.
