Alan Kotok - Personal Life

Personal Life

Alan Kotok was born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was raised as an only child in Vineland, New Jersey. During his childhood, he played with tools in his father's hardware store and learned model railroading. He was a precocious child, skipping two grades at high school, and he matriculated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) aged 16. Although his interest in computers began at Vineland High School, his first practical experience of computing came at MIT; there he developed a habit of working late at night when more computer time was available.

In 1977, at age 36, Kotok married Judith McCoy, a choir director and piano teacher on the faculty of the Longy School of Music. They lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cape May, New Jersey. The couple shared a love of 16th and 17th-century music and pipe organs, and toured historic pipe organs in Sweden, Germany, Italy and Mexico. They had a daughter, Leah Kotok, and two stepchildren from Judith's prior marriage, Frederica and Daryl Beck.

Kotok recorded an oral history at the Computer History Museum in 2004. He died at his home in Cambridge, apparently from a heart attack, on May 26, 2006, six months after the death of his wife during her treatment for cancer.