Joseph Henry 'Joe' Condon (born February 15, 1935 – January 2, 2012) was an American computer scientist, engineer and physicist, who spent most of his career at Bell Labs.
Condon developed an interest in physics and electronics at an early age[2] and credited his introduction to analytical thinking to an anonymous instrument maker.
How the servos work to run the arms of the disk drive, coding.In the 1960s, Condon contributed to the development of local area network digital telephone switching.
[1] Condon acquired a small AT&T PBX (telephone switch) that handled about 50 phones; he made the necessary hardware changes and Thompson wrote the necessary software programs.
[3] In 1975 Condon joined the Computer Research Center at Bell Labs where the C programming language and the UNIX operating system were created.
It was one that touched the hardware directly.In 1982 Condon collaborated with Andrew Ogielski to create the spin glass machine, a single-purpose computer "5-10 times faster than the Cray-1" designed to facilitate Monte Carlo calculations for theoretical physicists to determine the properties of a class of recently discovered complex magnetic materials such as spin glasses and various random antiferromagnets, thus combining his interests in digital systems and physics.
[1] In Condon's obituary, Physics Today called his work on the spin-glass machine a "classic" that "remain[s] accurate to this day, despite immense increases in computing power".
He was a Quaker and a frequent volunteer in the FISH Hospitality Program,[1] a local charity providing shelter for homeless people and single mothers.