He was the chief architect of the PDP-10 family of computers, and created the company's Internet Business Group, responsible for several forms of Web-based technology including the first popular search engine.

[2][3] He was a precocious child, skipping two grades at high school, and he matriculated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of 16 in the fall of 1958 and an MBA from Clark University in 1978.

[6] He was influenced by teachers such as Jack Dennis and John McCarthy and by his involvement in the student-organized Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), which he joined soon after starting college in 1958.

[8] They were able to use the TX-0 as a personal, single-user tool rather than a batch processing system, thanks to Dennis, faculty advisors and John McKenzie, the operations manager.

[8] With classmates Elwyn Berlekamp, Michael Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Wagner, Kotok began to develop McCarthy's IBM 704 chess-playing program in 1959.

"[15] The program drew criticism from Richard Greenblatt, who later wrote Mac Hack, which beat a person in tournament play,[16] and more recently, from Hans Berliner, when he looked back on it in 2005.

[3] Aiming at a scientific market, Digital machines had a 36-bit word length to accommodate artificial intelligence work in Lisp and to compete with IBM mainframe computers.

[24] In 1965, in what may have been the first around-the-world networking connection,[25] a PDP-6 at the University of Western Australia in Perth was operated from Boston in the United States via a telex link.

[6] Bell, Thomas Hastings, Richard Hill and Kotok wrote that the DECSystem-10 accelerated the transition from batch-processing to time-sharing and single-user systems.

[31] In April 1994, Kotok, Steve Fink, Gail Grant and Brian Reid from Digital traveled to CERN in Geneva to speak with Berners-Lee about the need for a consortium to create open standards and coordinate Web development.

[23] Digital created the AltaVista search engine, the Internet firewall, the Web portal, the webcast and live election returns.

[6][37] Digital and GC Tech were early W3C members and were among the sponsors of the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW4) in 1995 in Boston.

[38] Kotok coordinated a birds of a feather meeting on Selection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases on April 7, 1997, at WWW6 in Santa Clara, California.

[42] He helped to establish a new W3C office in India and worked with an internal task force to reduce membership fees in developing countries.

[46] In 1977, at age 36, Kotok married Judith McCoy, a choir director and piano teacher on the faculty of the Longy School of Music.