History
According to Carl Hewitt, unlike previous models of computation, the Actor model was inspired by physics including general relativity and quantum mechanics. It was also influenced by the programming languages Lisp, Simula and early versions of Smalltalk, as well as capability-based systems and packet switching. Its development was "motivated by the prospect of highly parallel computing machines consisting of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of independent microprocessors, each with its own local memory and communications processor, communicating via a high-performance communications network." Since that time, the advent of massive concurrency through multi-core computer architectures has revived interest in the Actor model.
Following Hewitt, Bishop, and Steiger's 1973 publication, Irene Greif developed an operational semantics for the Actors model as part of her doctoral research. Two years later, Henry Baker and Hewitt published a set of axiomatic laws for Actor systems. Other major milestones include William Clinger's dissertation, in 1981, introducing a denotational semantics based on power domains, and Gul Agha's 1985 dissertation which further developed a transition-based semantic model complementary to Clinger's. This resulted in the full development of actor model theory.
Major software implementation work was done by Russ Atkinson, Beppe Attardi, Henry Baker, Gerry Barber, Peter Bishop, Peter de Jong, Ken Kahn, Henry Lieberman, Carl Manning, Tom Reinhardt, Richard Steiger, and Dan Theriault, in the Message Passing Semantics Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Research groups led by Chuck Seitz at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Bill Dally at MIT constructed computer architectures that further developed the message passing in the model. See Actor model implementation.
Research on the Actor model has been carried out at Caltech Computer Science, Kyoto University Tokoro Laboratory, MCC, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, SRI, Stanford University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Pierre and Marie Curie University (University of Paris 6), University of Pisa, University of Tokyo Yonezawa Laboratory and elsewhere.
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