Dr. McCarthy’s career followed the arc of modern computing. Trained as a mathematician, he was responsible for seminal advances in the field and was often called the father of computer time-sharing, a major development of the 1960s that enabled many people and organizations to draw simultaneously from a single computer source, like a mainframe, without having to own one.
Though he did not foresee the rise of the personal computer, Dr. McCarthy was prophetic in describing the implications of other technological advances decades before they gained currency.
“In the early 1970s, he presented a paper in France on buying and selling by computer, what is now called electronic commerce,” said Whitfield Diffie, an Internet security expert who worked as a researcher for Dr. McCarthy at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
While teaching mathematics at Dartmouth in 1956, Dr. McCarthy was the principal organizer of the first Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The idea of simulating human intelligence had been discussed for decades, but the term “artificial intelligence” — originally used to help raise funds to support the conference — stuck.
In 1958, Dr. McCarthy moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was at M.I.T. that he began working on what he called List Processing Language, or Lisp, a computer language that became the standard tool for artificial intelligence research and design.
Around the same time he came up with a technique called garbage collection, in which pieces of computer code that are not needed by a running computation are automatically removed from the computer’s random access memory.
He developed the technique in 1959 and added it to Lisp. That technique is now routinely used in Java and other programming languages.
His M.I.T. work also led to fundamental advances in software and operating systems. In one, he was instrumental in developing the first time-sharing system for mainframe computers.
The power of that invention would come to shape Dr. McCarthy’s worldview to such an extent that when the first personal computers emerged with local computing and storage in the 1970s, he belittled them as toys.
Rather, he predicted, wrongly, that in the future everyone would have a relatively simple and inexpensive computer terminal in the home linked to a shared, centralized mainframe and use it as an electronic portal to the worlds of commerce and news and entertainment media.
Dr. McCarthy, who taught briefly at Stanford in the early 1950s, returned there in 1962 and in 1964 became the founding director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL. Its optimistic, space-age goal, with financial backing from the Pentagon, was to create a working artificial intelligence system within a decade.
Years later he developed a healthy respect for the challenge, saying that creating a “thinking machine” would require “1.8 Einsteins and one-tenth the resources of the Manhattan Project.”
Artificial intelligence is still thought to be far in the future, though tremendous progress has been made in systems that mimic many human skills, including vision, listening, reasoning and, in robotics, the movements of limbs. From the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, the Stanford lab played a vital role in creating some of these technologies, including robotics and machine-vision natural language.
In 1972, the laboratory drew national attention when Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, wrote about it in Rolling Stone magazine under the headline “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.” The article evoked the esprit de corps of a group of researchers who had been freed to create their own virtual worlds, foreshadowing the emergence of cyberspace. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” Mr. Brand wrote.
Dr. McCarthy had begun inviting the Homebrew Computer Club, a Silicon Valley hobbyist group, to meet at the Stanford lab. Among its growing membership were Steven P. Jobs and Steven Wozniak, who would go on to found Apple. Mr. Wozniak designed his first personal computer prototype, the Apple 1, to share with his Homebrew friends.
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