Gerald John "Jerry" Popek (September 22, 1946 – July 20, 2008) was an American computer scientist, known for his research on operating systems and virtualization.
At UCLA he worked on virtualisation, network security, reliable operating systems and Databases.
Around 1980 he worked on the LOCUS distributed operating system,[4] an early implementation of the single-system image idea.
Between April 1981 and June 1983 Popek served on the DARPA "steering committee" for BSD UNIX formed by Duane Adams of DARPA to guide the design work leading to 4.2BSD.
Other members of the committee were Bob Fabry, Bill Joy and Sam Leffler from UCB, Alan Nemeth and Rob Gurwitz from BBN, Dennis Ritchie from Bell Labs, Keith Lantz from Stanford, Rick Rashid from Carnegie-Mellon, Bert Halstead from MIT and Dan Lynch from ISI.