Michael J. Hawley

Biography

Michael Jerome Hawley was born on November 18, 1961 at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. He interned at Bell Labs in high school and earned degrees in computer science and music from Yale.

Hawley began work at Lucasfilm, and afterwards at NeXT for six years, where he had a close relationship with the company, living with Steve Jobs and Marvin Minsky. At NeXT he developed a digital library, which contained digital versions of the complete works of Shakespeare, a dictionary a thesaurus and a book of quotations.

After NeXT, he spent nine years working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where he developed Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow, which are precursors to the internet of things.

In 1998, he served as the scientific director on an expedition to Mount Everest, and tied for first place in the 2002 Van Cliburn amateur piano competition.

Hawley died on June 24, 2020.