Born in 1927, McCarthy had a PhD in mathematics and was a long-standing professor at Stanford University. He was the first to use the term "artificial intelligence" at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 and is one of the founders of the field of A.I. research.
His programming language, Lisp, together with its dialects, is often the language of choice for artificial intelligence applications.
McCarthy was also one of the first to propose selling computing power through a utility business model in 1961, an idea that was abandoned by the 1990s but came back with a bang in the 2000s with the increasing use of grid and cloud computing.
For his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, McCarthy received a Turing award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1971.
He was also an active poster on Usenet forums, and he maintained a website where he published his thoughts, lectures, comments and writing.