Alfred Z. Spector

Who is Alfred Z. Spector?

Alfred Zalmon Spector is an American computer scientist and research manager.

Spector received his Bachelor of Arts degree in applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He received his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1981, where his research included measurements of remote procedure call operations on experimental Ethernet. His dissertation was titled Multiprocessing Architectures for Local Computer Networks, and advisor was Forest Baskett III.

Spector was an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. While there, he served as doctoral advisor to Randy Pausch, Jeff Eppinger and Joshua Bloch and seven others. Spector was a founder of Transarc Corporation in 1989 which built and sold distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems software, commercializing the Andrew File System developed at CMU. After Transarc was acquired by IBM, he became a researcher and software executive there, including the position of vice president of strategy and technology within IBM's Software Group. He remained an advisor to CMU.